Comment 5 for bug 196453

Thanks for the Outline mode fix, that's a step in the right direction :)

I'm glad that you find these objects useful in *your specific* workflow of slicing webpages, but you must also understand that other people find it frustrating when you change the rules on us like this. The slider did not work that way in the previous version of the program.

To contrast your story, I mostly use 0% opacity objects temporarily in order to make unions or see what's behind something. I rarely have any 0% opacity objects in the finished picture, which is why it frustrates me that they disappear, because I'm always planning on grabbing them again later and doing something useful with them.

I'm not sure if this is some sort of miscommunication between artists and programmers, because I don't see how having 'no fill' click-through objects leads to the logical conclusion that 'no opacity' should also be click-through, especially since you remove the edges of the object as well.

Clicking is indeed fundamental; you can't do much with an object you can't click. The word 'opacity' means "the degree to which an object lets light pass through it". However, the opacity slider as it works now seems more like a 'reality anchor' to another dimension and once you set it to 0%, the object is forever lost in a parallel universe.

I can perhaps see your point about 'no fill' objects being click-through as it were, on the grounds that people find it useful in their work since it's a quick way to draw a frame instead wasting time aligning four edges with the Bezier tool. The goal is more efficient, convenient workflow.
In the same way, it is more convenient for me to just drag the opacity slider to zero when what I really want is to make the object fully transparent for a short while. If I wanted to make it unselectable as well, I'd put it in the background or something, but I'd certainly want to still be able to move the object.

Usually when you have a fully transparent object Y sitting on top of object X there's a reason for it, and it shouldn't be a big surprise. By making object Y click-through you're already making a big exception there: An alpha of 255 is a solid color, an Alpha of 1 is aaaalmost invisible (but still clickable and movable), but an Alpha of 0 makes the object cease to function like it did before? This is not a logic progression at all. How can you argue that this is *not* a major exception to the rule?
Not only is the object not clickable, it's not even movable either. Suddenly it doesn't work like all the other objects do.

I can understand why click-through is a desirable thing when you do splicing, but it is not desirable at all when I, as a hapless user, think I am changing the opacity. If anything, the click-through anomaly should be a property that you set specifically as an exception on the object, it shouldn't just happen as a side-effect of opacity.

When I work with opacity I think of it as a stained-glass window that you put thinner or thicker layers of paint on top of, and when I polish the window really hard to see through it, I don't expect suddenly to be able to put my hand through the glass because it reaches a certain level of transparency.