I've got a question about how some SVG elements should be rendered with regard to clipping. I'm trying to set up two opaque layers and then mask off portions of the upper layer to be transparent, so that the lower layer is visible.

I've got an example of what I'm trying to do, and it renders as I would like it to in Eye of Gnome, but both Firefox and Inkscape do not render the clipped region
I've looked at a couple of bug reports I think it might be related to one of these:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/172123
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/171243

But given that Firefox renders it the same, it's entirely possible that I've stumbled on to a lucky bug in the Eye of Gnome renderer that just happens to do what I want.

Example files can be found here:
http://oregonstate.edu/~sandinp/Ubuntu/Inkscape/

What can I do to get this to work in Inkscape? Or is there a better more Inkscape friendly way to achieve the same thing?

Not exactly sure you are looking for? Are you talking about a bug in how Inkscape SVG images are displayed in firefox. Or are you just looking for a mask function? Inkscape has a mask function. Under the objects menu.

http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/gal ... ffield.png

If you want to know for sure, use Batik Rasterizer to save your image. Batik is a pretty good benchmark. If Batik doesn't render it properly then it's probably luck that it works as you hoped in Eye of Gnome.