What is the difference between ng-if and ng-show/ng-hide

Question

I\'m trying to understand the difference between ng-if and ng-show/ng-hide, but they look the same to me.

Is there a differenc

Answer 1

@EdSpencer is correct. If you have a lot of elements and you use ng-if to only instantiate the relevant ones, you are saving resources. @CodeHater is also somewhat correct, if you are going to remove and show an element very often, hiding it instead of removing it could improve performance.

The main use case I find for ng-if is that it allows me to cleanly validate and eliminte an element if the contents is illegal. For instance I could reference to a null image name variable and that will throw an error but if I ng-if and check if it's null, it's all good. If I did an ng-show, the error would still fire.