Difference between revisions of "Drag and Drop"

Revision as of 20:41, 22 August 2021

Information on this page is applicable to TDE

This page contains archived KDE 3.x content from various sources which is directly applicable to (or has been updated for) the Trinity Desktop Environment.

Protocols: Drag-And-Drop

Today, Drag-And-Drop (DND) is considered a requirement for commercial-quality applications. On most operating systems, support for DND is built-in, so everybody uses it and all programs can communicate with each other.

On X, however, there was no standard, so various groups have developed their own protocols, with the result that programs written for one protocol cannot talk to programs written for a different protocol. Clearly this does not satisfy the fundamental requirement that DND allow the user to drag data from any program to any other program.

XDND

Shortly before the release of KDE 1.x, a common effort was started to create a sophisticated standard drag-and-drop protocol. The result of this effort is the XDND Standard. In Version 2, KDE started supporting it as native drag and drop protocol throughout the entire desktop.

Information how to program drag-and-drop in TDE applications can be found in the TQt documentation.

Some historical remarks

Originally the KDE developers expected XDND to be finished before the release of KDE 1.0, so they were forced to create the temporary KDE-specific KDND protocol due to the lack of a reasonable standard could be replaced much ealier. But things sometimes take time in the software business.

Motif

Motif, the former so-called "standard toolkit" on X11, also defined a drag-and-drop protocol. Some information about this effort and why it was not widely accepted can be found on this archived page.

The only widely-used application that used to support it in the days of KDE 2.x was Netscape's Communicator. To make it possible to drag URLs from Netscape onto KDE applications, KDE also supported Motif-drops in version 2.

Initial Author; Matthias Ettrich

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
+[[Category:KDE3]]
+[[Category:Architecture]]
+[[Category:Developers]]
+{{Applicable to TDE}}
 == Protocols: Drag-And-Drop ==
@@ Line 15: / Line 20: @@
 == XDND ==
-Shortly before the release of KDE-1.x, a common effort was started
+Shortly before the release of KDE 1.x, a common effort was started
 to create a sophisticated standard drag-and-drop protocol. The result
-of this effort is the [http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/ XDND Standard]. In
+of this effort is the [https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/XDND/ XDND Standard].
-Version 2, KDE supports it as native drag and drop protocol throughout
+In Version 2, KDE started supporting it as native drag and drop protocol throughout
 the entire desktop.
-Information how to program drag-and-drop in KDE applications can
+Information how to program drag-and-drop in TDE applications can
-be found in the [https://web.archive.org/web/20100923083859/http://doc.trolltech.com/3.3/draganddrop.html Qt documentation].
+be found in the [http://trinitydesktop.org/docs/qt3/draganddrop.html TQt documentation].
+=== Some historical remarks ===
-''Some historical remarks: Originally we expected XDND to be finished before the release KDE-1.0, so the temporary KDE-specific KDND protocol we were forced to create due to the lack of a reasonable standard could be replaced much ealier. But things sometimes take time in the software business.''
+Originally the KDE developers expected XDND to be finished
+before the release of KDE 1.0, so they were forced to create the temporary KDE-specific
+KDND protocol due to the lack of a reasonable standard could be replaced much ealier.
+But things sometimes take time in the software business.
 == Motif ==
@@ Line 30: / Line 39: @@
 Motif, the former so-called "standard toolkit" on X11, also
 defined a drag-and-drop protocol. Some information about this effort
-and why it was not widely accepted can be found on [http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/other_protocols.html XDND's Other Protocols-page].
+and why it was not widely accepted can be found on
+[http://web.archive.org/web/20110709030345/http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/other_protocols.html this archived page].
-The only widely-used application that supports it these days is
+The only widely-used application that used to support it in the days
-Netscape's Communicator. To make it possible to drag URLs from
+of KDE 2.x was Netscape's Communicator. To make it possible to drag URLs from
-Netscape onto KDE applications, KDE also supports Motif-drops in
+Netscape onto KDE applications, KDE also supported Motif-drops in
 version 2.
 ''Initial Author;'' [mailto:ettrich@kde.org Matthias Ettrich]
-[[Category:KDE3]]
-[[Category:Architecture]]
-[[Category:Developers]]