# Network | Chosen Elements

When a node or edge is selected or hovered its visible characteristics can be changed.

In this network, an element (node, edge or label) will change a characteristic when hovered, and it will be locked in when selected. This is managed by setting up a 'chosen' function that will be called when the element containing the function is chosen. These functions may be set on nodes, edges and labels, at the individual or group level.

All states (unselected, hover-over-unselected, selected, and hover-over selected) may be handled as needed by the application using vis, as the select and hover states are passed to the chosen function when called. Additionally, the id of the element is passed to allow context-specific characteristic adjustment on select or hover as needed.

It should be noted that the characteristics which might affect the position of elements have been left out on purpose. While it might be interesting to make them changeable, this is problematic on hovering. Consider that the user hovers over an object. If it changed characteristics that moved it outside of the hover-distance, it would then no longer be hovering. So it would be moved back to its original prosition, within the hover-distance and then again be hovering over the object. This hysteresis loop is kept from occurring by leaving out the characteristics that could cause it. Some seemingly innocuous changes (such as resizing a node's label on hover that would in turn cause the node to resize and move out of hover-distance) may still cause hysteresis, but with care they should be avoidable.