Introducing HTML5, Second Edition

Chapter 8: 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 you want to leave alone in a field, 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 ...