A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at Brighton Skillswap called “The page and the desktop”. With some of the newer HTML5 APIs it is now possible to redesign how your web pages interact with the desktop. Web pages are all too often little islands that fail to interact well with the wider user interfaces of our devices. The talk tries to explain how the new Drag/Drop and File APIs could make web pages more equal in the world of applications.

The talked started with a series of demos that show what is currently possible. I have recreated the demos in a short screencast, hopefully it will give more context to the slides.

Example code

• The Firefox Virtual File Hack />A hack to create virtual file download using the anchor tag type attribute and the JavaScript window object
• DownloadURL and Data URL support />A test using the DownloadURL type and Data URL together
• DownloadURL support />A test using the DownloadURL type for a drag and drop method setDate
• Enterbox Idea />An experimental UI component that accepts HTML drop and paste