HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Drag and Drop
Remy Sharp
SO WE'VE COME
to the black sheep chapter of our
book: Drag and Drop. It's not a black sheep in that cool
way, like Darth Vader's version of the Imperial Tie Fighter;
no, sadly it's the black sheep like you want to leave it
alone in the fi eld, and let it do its own thing. Some better
men have even worse things to say about the spec.
So why is it here? Why is it in the HTML5 spec—and yes,
drag and drop actually is part of the real HTML5 spec. Well,
it's here because Microsoft Internet Explorer added drag
and drop back in 1999 in IE5—yep, that long ago. Since
then, Safari had implemented IE's API, so Ian Hickson, the
HTML5 editor, reverse engineered the API, did all the hard
work to understand exactly what was going on (describing
the MSDN documentation as having a “vague hand-wavy
description”), and documented the API.
