Re: Drag and drop mysteries

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Thu, 2005-05-19 at 06:38 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> >at 1) How is one supposed to know this stuff with the "STRING" and 
> >"text/plain"?
> >It's nowhere documented, it only appears in the examples without further 
> >explanation,
> >so it looked completely random to me.
> >What other "types" are there for drag and drop targets?
> 
> the "text/plain" entry is a conventional MIME type. google for MIME.
> the "STRING" entry is a hangover from historic X D-n-D, which was
> developed before MIME (or at around the same time). google for 
> "X atom string drag drop".
> 
> STRING is important for back-compatibility with many older
> programs. Newer DnD handling is all MIME based, just like your email.

By the way, GTK+/gtkmm 2.6 has some convenience methods for this stuff,
such as drag_dest_add_text_targets() and drag_dest_add_image_targets(),
and the same for sources:
http://www.gtkmm.org/docs/gtkmm-2.4/docs/reference/html/classGtk_1_1Widget.html#a17

I don't know whether that helps much in this situation. I'd welcome
improved documentation on all this.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com