This balancing innovator
My response to Stuart Langridge’s article “The innovation balance” which cited my Drag & Drop Sortable Lists:
I take no offense to the article. To the contrary, it contributed to my 15 minutes of fame. I agree with the reader comments that a technique that doesn’t work in IE is at most an interesting experiment. Which gets right to the original purpose of my Drag & Drop Sortable Lists. It was an interesting experiment. It happened just like this: one day I came across Simon Cozens’ sortable lists. “Neato,” thought I. Followed by, “I could make some improvements…that would be fun.” I did and it was.
Brief history of my personal platform dogma: Windows Bigot, Linux Revolutionary, Linux Refugee/Mac Snob. Where we arrive at today with me still using a Mac. But I’ve settled into a Whatever-Platform-Works-for-You zen comfort zone with occasional bursts of “Nyah nyah, my Apple product works better than your suxx0r wannabe product”. Take anything “iPod” for instance. Anyhow, that my examples currently only work in Safari and Firefox is coincident with me being a Mac guy. A lazy Mac guy even, since my partner’s Toshiba laptop was sitting on the coffee table the entire time I worked on those examples. I’m imagining somewhere in the multiverse another me is typing away on his Windows laptop describing why his DnD Sortable Lists currently only work in Internet Explorer, guiltily looking at his partner’s PowerBook G4 sitting idle…
I recently attempted to add the drop and drag list to a larger project and I’ve been having some difficulties. More specifically the items in the list will only drag to the top of the list. It is impossible to drag an item to the middle of the list. Has anyone had a similar problem to this one? Or rather does anyone know a possible solution? It worked fine before I added it to the larger project.
Well, anyways, let me know. Thanks.
Tim, been checking out your dragsort library. Couldn’t find another way to contact you, so here it is:
Let’s say you have a list of objects, to which you point dragsort.makeListSortable(…). Those LI objs have their onclick handler set… and you drag one of the LIs to a new position (so far everything functions great), then let go… the onclick handler fires! So, the mousedown… mousemove… mouseup combination manages to trigger the click handler.
My code doesn’t define a mouseup handler, in case you were wondering, just onclick. I’m working on a work-around, but not working cleanly yet.
Second thing is, it would be nice if makeListSortable could be applied to a list of any reasonable DOM objects, not just LIs. My app was using DIVs, and when it didn’t work with your library I noticed your samples used …, so I switched and it works. Works as designed?
Thanks for sharing your cool code!
So the point I’ve arrived at is realizing that your events.js code is setting up an Observer subscribe type of relationship between event handlers and objects that are listened for, is this right? So, if I want my app to receive mousedown or mouseup, I’ve got to join your event broadcast stack? Hmm, this app’s already written, no budget to rewrite it, is there a way to have your code place nicely with existing handlers already set directly on the given DOM object? Or am I missing the point completely?
Thanks!
I’ve had problems with your scripts and prototype.js running together, can you help me? (I’m proving with “Sorting in two dimensions”). I’m from Argentina
Thankss!!