Drag-and-Drop Protocol for the X Window System

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 the default and all programs can communicate with each other.

 

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

 

XDND is a protocol that everybody can use so all programs can exchange data via DND.  (Just like the X Selection mechanism ensures that everybody can exchange data via the clipboard.)

 

This protocol was developed by John Lindal at New Planet Software, with help from Glenn Bach and lots of feedback from Arnt Gulbrandsen at Troll Tech and Owen Taylor of GTK+ and input from Elliot Lee at Red Hat Software.

 

Comparison to other DND protocols

 

Related protocols

• XDS

• XSearch