You are not wrong about what you want, and I am trying to come up with a way to make it happen because I like this idea, but here are the current problems and hopefully some clarification about why it doesn't work that way now.
First, about the state: The problem is that the state you are describing when dragging and dropping is completely in the DOM, which in tiddlywiki can be refreshed and recreated at any time. So the state has to be saved when it is changed or it may all be lost by something else on the wiki changing. Jeremy and others have put a lot of effort into reducing the number of refreshes that happen so it doesn't happen constantly, but that just means you would lose your work inconsistently when the dom refreshes instead of constantly. This makes having the state saved manually by the user a bad solution because it may seemingly randomly lose work. Most of the rest of the problem comes from how tiddlywiki has to know what you are trying to move, and what is a valid location for dropping it. If you can pick up individual words than how do you tell tiddlywiki you want to pick up the whole paragraph? And adding transclusions to that creates problems like, what happens if you drag a word from inside of a transclusion to the containing tiddler around it. I think that making something to let you rearrange words in plain text by dragging and dropping would be relatively straight forward. Extending that to being able to drag some sort of generic entity becomes much much more difficult, particularly when you can have nested div tags. If you click on a word inside a tag for the sentence, which is nested inside a tag for the paragraph which one is supposed to be picked up? That is the sort of UI problem that makes me stop using software. And in your example, yes, we can do exactly that. The problem is that you then introduce something new to add to the text that I think is just as confusing as needing an external list. Because you need to mark both the things that are possible to drag and all of the potential places where you can drop something. You could say 'you can drag any paragraph' or 'you can drag any word' and use drag and drop to rearrange them, but then in order to make it work on the text you are going to have to lose some formatting and transclusions will break it because you are going from raw next -> wikitext -> html and then back from html->raw text. I am sure that is possible but I doubt it is easy to do in a way that preserves the specific markup in what you originally wrote. Unless I am completely misunderstanding what you are asking for. If you want something like a button but you click and drag an item from one place and drop it in another and the resulting action is based on which starting and ending point is used than that is a different problem. BUT, and this is very important I think, it wouldn't let you rearrange text any differently than you can rearrange plain text using existing wikitext widgets. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/5df882a7-84c4-4770-b488-830d0eb01d94%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
