Drag-and-drop on web pages

Many web interfaces (like the WordPress dashboard in which I type this) allow you to drag and drop sections of the page to rearrange them. I think I first saw it when the personalised Google homepage (google.com/ig) came out, but I don’t know if it was the first. Here are some libraries that seem to help you

• JQuery: UI/Droppable
• script.aculo.us: Draggable
• Yahoo! UI Library: Drag & Drop Examples
• Google Web Toolkit (example)
• Dojo toolkit: I know it has it, but I can’t find it and here it is.

So it seems that all JavaScript frameworks have it. It also seems that JQuery has “won”.

But it seems YUI’s “Reordering a List” example is the closest match to what we actually want, but it seems to require too many lines of code.

Some of the rest seem even worse: unless you are actually using the library for a lot of things, it is simply too much code to just drop into a bare-bones web page you’ve been writing from scratch.