[whatwg] Drag and drop in HTML5

[Dean Edwards]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> I am currently working on trying to specify IE's (and now Safari's) drag 
> and drop API.
> 
> However, from an HTML point of view, it doesn't make sense. Having a style 
> property control application behaviour is wrong -- the fact that something 
> is draggable isn't going to change depending on what the skin is. It's not 
> even going to change based on the media -- something that's draggable (via 
> a mouse) on a visual UA is still going to be draggable when the user is 
> using an interactive aural agent (albeit with a radically different 
> interaction model probably involving explicitly picking two elements and 
> saying that the first is to be dragged to the second).
> 
> So there is currently no whole-element drag-and-drop API that we can 
> conveniently re-use.

Controlling behavior through CSS is OK if the what you are changing is CSS.

It seems there two kinds of drag/drop. One kind affects the DOM, e.g. 
changing the order of items in a list. The other kind affects CSS, e.g. 
dragging a window on screen. For a draggable window only the CSS "left" 
and "top" positions would be a affected. It would be difficult to 
specify this without CSS!

Ideally, i'd like to do both. Use CSS to declare a draggable element and 
use HTML to declare a list that can be re-ordered.

-dean