[whatwg] Drag-and-drop feedback

[Charles Pritchard]

On 11/16/2010 4:05 PM, Daniel Cheng wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 14:48, Charles Pritchard <chuck at jumis.com 
> <mailto:chuck at jumis.com>> wrote:
>
>             When interacting with non-DOM apps or pages, some
>             platforms can't easily
>             convert arbitrary MIME types to native data transfer types for
>             copy/paste or DnD. For this reason, I think the spec
>             should explicitly
>             list MIME types for which UAs should handle the conversion
>             to native
>             data transfer types. A couple that come to mind: text/plain,
>             text/uri-list, text/rtf, application/rtf, text/html, text/xml,
>             image/png, and image/svg+xml. UAs can make a best-effort
>             attempt to
>             convert the other types, but it won't be guaranteed that
>             they will be
>             there for interaction with non-DOM applications.
>
>         I'm not sure what this means exactly. Could you elaborate?
>
>
>     I don't think these need to be "converted" by a UA -- the
>     application which
>     receives the data does that conversion on its own.
>
>     This is a good use case for "promise"-based data callbacks.
>
>
> Automatic conversion is already implemented for some types (text, URL, 
> and maybe HTML). It's just not explicitly mentioned in the spec. I'm 
> not sure how a policy of no conversion would work; the clipboard 
> mechanism/encoding varies greatly from platform to platform. With no 
> automatic conversion, a page trying to read text from a drop would 
> have to first sniff the operating system, choose the appropriate 
> strategy for reading text, and then transcode the result to a DOMString.
>
> Daniel

Sorry, I completely misunderstood this one. I thought you were referring 
to operations from the browser to the desktop.

The UA could handle conversion to image/png. It's low-hanging fruit.

Conversion from complex formats into markup is something that should be 
handled by the non-DOM app, not the UA.

Lacking decent markup conversion, a FileList is fine. I don't have to 
"sniff" the operating system,
I just have to be determined on what mime types I'm going to support.

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