Re: Example of keyboard drag and drop.

Hey Earl,

Some of your ideas are issues we are aware of (e.g., moving between 
containers), while others are not.

> My question is does the architecture developed for Reorderer such that 
> it could be enhaced for multiple selections, dragging things from one 
> container/component across boundaries to another?

We are approaching a 0.1 release, meaning that this is not the final 
version of the Reorderer by a long shot.  We plan to continue developing 
it over the coming months.  How we do that is not yet decided; that is, 
we will either change the architecture so that others can enhance it as 
you suggest, or we will change it so that it supports that kind of 
functionality (multiple selections, inter-container dnd) out of the box.

One of the issues we will tackle first, due to our association with the 
uPortal project, is allowing for nested orderable objects.  For example, 
we have been asked to help with the reordering of portlets within a 
portal, and work on that is progressing.  Note that one of those 
portlets could contain a Lightbox -- a case of nested orderables.  In 
this case, unlike the dragging between container, one wants to confine 
the re-ordering to a "level".  In this example, that would be the 
ordering of portlets at the highest level, and the ordering of images 
within a lightbox portlet.  It's going to be interesting to figure out 
how to achieve all these different ways of reordering things.

In any case, do you mind if I post your suggestions to the fluid-work 
list, so we can get the Fluid UX people involved?

> Are you proposing it for the DHTML stuff or was your post more for 
> informational purposes?

To the extent that we are trying to follow/define standards, in terms of 
(1) ARIA markup (e.g., Lightbox.html), and (2) keyboard accessibility, 
then, yes I am proposing it for DHTML.  An issue, however, is that the 
current DHTML documents are focussed on widgets such as menus, 
checkboxes, and so forth.  Fluid's lightbox, and reorderer are not 
really widgets.  So, I'm not entirely sure where they fit in vis-a-vis 
the emerging DHTML standards.

Possibly they represent a more general pattern -- "if users are 
navigating among a set of items, be they items in a menu, list, or 
lightbox, the general way to do that is to use the arrow keys.", and 
"reordering objects within a set using the keyboard should use 
ctl+cursor keys", or something along those lines.

-- 
;;;;joseph

'A dog, a panic in a pagoda'
 - "Bob", W. A. Yankovic -

Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2007 16:43:59 UTC