Comment 31 for bug 196453

I was glad to find this thread, and that this issue with Inkscape was being discussed, but very surprised to find that some people actually defend it!

The reasons that I object to this behaviour are both "philosophical" and usability-related.

1. From a "philosophical" viewpoint: I feel it doesn't make sense for a "continuous" opacity variable to have an influence on a binary property of an object, i.e. its "concreteness" (e.g. "clickability"). I consider it to make more sense for an object with 0% opacity to be "existing but invisible" rather than non-existing.

2. Usability: The user should be the master of what's going on in the project, and should therefore have access to all objects of his/her creation, even if they happen to be meant to be invisible in the final exported image. Furthermore, fully transparent objects ARE selectable, just not by a direct click. One may use TAB, one may use a selection box (and then proceed to deselect anything else that might have been selected in the same process). If the philosophical viewpoint is that transparent objects are non-existent, then either _remove all_ ways to select the object, or _keep all_ ways to select the object.