Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Drag and Drop -- still a non-starter in HTML 5?

Why is drag and drop such a drag?

Several years ago I looked into using drag-and-drop in an internal web application that I support at work. I was using YUI, and YUI has considerable drag-and-drop support. I didn't take this very far, but it did what I needed it to do.

Then today I stumbled across an entire rat's nest full of rants, flames, and painful war stories about drag-and-drop in HTML 5.

Sounds like a major ouch!

This is a shame, a big shame, for several reasons:

  • HTML 5 is one of the most important languages of the future. Many very significant applications will be written using it. People have been sweating the HTML 5 details for a decade. We want it to be the best language it can be.

  • Drag-and-drop is a very important UI technique, and it's long past time that web developers be able to use it easily and naturally in simple standards-compliant HTML.

  • Up to this point, HTML 5 has been an nearly un-interrupted series of success stories, so to have such a big black eye is unfortunate.



Maybe I'm giving too much weight to the nay-sayers. However, PPK and Hixie are as respected as they come in web-developer-land, so if they say it, it's certainly so.

On the plus side, I'm pleased to have stumbled across this link to Francisco Tolmasky's web log. The 280Slides work is extremely impressive -- subscribed!

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