Re: Triggering HTML5 DnD via a touch screen

Awesome, thanks Jacob!  I'll check out IE11!

Rick


On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 1:59 PM, Jacob Rossi <Jacob.Rossi@microsoft.com>wrote:

> Agreed, Microsoft wants the web to work no matter what input device you
> use, especially including touch. Yesterday, we released a preview of IE11
> [1] and it includes support for touch drag drop (on by default). Users can
> initiate a drag in IE11 by press and holding on an element. Dragging and
> dropping then follows the same events as dragging with a mouse.
>
> There's certainly improvements that could be made to the HTML5 DnD APIs.
> But I agree we should avoid doing that redesign in this thread. This is
> about unlocking sites today for touch users.
>
> There are some aspects of the APIs that don't lend themselves well to
> touch. Similar to the design of touch-action in the Pointer Events spec
> [2], if we only needed to read the draggable attribute to determine drag
> feasibility in a site then we could enable more consistent performance for
> touch users through multi-threaded implementations. However, the HTML5 DnD
> APIs allow cancelling the dragstart event to prevent a drag, and that
> limits what we can do here for touch perf. Deprecating the ability to
> prevent a drag by cancelling dragstart is something we should seriously
> consider.
>
> -Jacob
>
> [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie
> [2] https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/pointerevents/raw-file/tip/pointerEvents.html
>
> On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 12:02 AM, Rick Byers <rbyers@google.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> > Chromium has experimental support for triggering the HTML5 DnD APIs
> using a touchscreen (instead of just with a mouse), and we're considering
> enabling this by default soon (http://crbug.com/168162).
> > This doesn't involve any changes to the API or semantics, and what
> pointing device is being used is transparent to the application.
> >
> > Before we enable this by default, I'd like to hear thoughts from the
> community, especially from other browser implementers.  The spec
> > (http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/editing.html#dnd) was
> clearly written to be agnostic to the input device (although it describes
> the mouse scenario pretty clearly as an example).  Still I figure it's
> worth discussing whether touch activation of the DnD APIs is something all
> the major browsers see as reasonable.  Any concerns?
> >
> > In Chromium drag is initiated by long press (if the touch events aren't
> consumed by the application), but that's a UI design detail that could vary
> between browsers and potentially different versions of browsers.  I don't
> think it's worth getting into the UX issues of exactly how drag should be
> initiated with touch here.
> >
> > I know there are some concerns with the DnD API (eg.
> > http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_html5_drag.html),
> > but I consider that largely orthogonal.  We have an API that's widely
> supported and is the only way to achieve important scenarios (eg.
> > dragging files or other content across browser windows, for example on
> sites like Google Drive).  If we can come up with a compatible way to
> improve the API, that's great and would automatically benefit all input
> types.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >    Rick
> >
>
>
>