Re: Drag 'N' Drop Protocol (?!)

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel nuclecu unam mx>]

> 	  Summary: I know that the GTK+ is "Open", I understand GNU, and I
> know "open standard" and "proprietary" were not the best terms to use, but
> I don't think Gnome should limit its Drag'n'Drop interactivity to only
> apps which have been developed using GTK+.
> 
> 	  Simply implementing XDnD would already give us D'n'D
> inter-operability with the large range of KDE software that's out there.

Ok, here is the story: Elliot started a group to have a unified DnD
protocol which is what we now call Xde.  The group included the
authors of the two toolkits that use Xdnd.  Elliot implemented the
protocol in Gtk as a reference implementation and the authors
disappeared for some time and came back with a protocol that did some
things better and some things apparently were not that much better.

Both Xde and Xdnd protocols have design problems (like there is now
way to tell the status of the drop operation).

Motif DND protocol, on the other hand, happens to be huge but it
addresses all of the disturbing problems of Xde and Xdnd.  Apparently
Owen Taylor is interested in adding the Motif code support to Gtk, and
when this happens, we will support that protocol.

It should be also possible to support multiple protocols at the same
time, but any further discussion on this subject should wait for the
post Gtk 1.0 release, as the api is going to change after gtk 1.0 and
the api will be the foundation for any further integration.

best wishes,
Miguel.