Should all styles be opaque?

[meetar]

Investigating this issue: https://github.com/tangrams/differ/issues/10 I discovered that at least one of the refill draw styles is partially transparent, and relying on the canvas background-color for proper coloring:

Is there a benefit to transparency here? Would it be better for the basemap to be completely opaque?

[nvkelso]

@patriciogonzalezvivo would know more why that dot pattern is transparent.

But for allowing data "underlays", a transparent option is a good thing.

[patriciogonzalezvivo]

As far as I can see, this line https://github.com/tangrams/refill-style/blob/gh-pages/refill-style.yaml#L951 is not necessary and is setting alpha channel to 0.0

[patriciogonzalezvivo]

In some tangram blocks I leave the open the option of having alpha and transparency. Why? well, in the case of polygons-diagonal-stripes it have been prove for me that this is a fast way to apply an effect to a type of landuse while let you see the treatment of the earth layer under it.

Hill shading in TRON2 is a good example of that. There is a catch on it... you have to set the blend mode to something else that the default blending style... other wise is blended against the background-color of the canvas context.

Refill, seams to have old styles from a pretangram/blocks era... where all this (and other) problems were addresses.

[nvkelso]

@meetar can you test this against @sensescape's latest roads-refactor branch to see if it's still an issue, please?

[meetar]

@nvkelso All clear!

[nvkelso]

Closing as config changed, thanks for checking!

[sensescape]

Thanks @meetar !