Last week I covered a really simple introduction to the HTML Drag and Drop API, for those of you who have never used it before. The demo has the minimum code required to produce a drag and drop example. Let's take that a little further and incorporate the dataTransfer object, which has methods and properties that can be used in the midst of a drag and drop operation.

First, I can use the setData() method of the dataTransfer object, which I'll incorporate in the midst of my event listener when listening for a dragstart event (an event I didn't need to use in the previous demo). The relevant line looks something like this (where "e" is the event object):

As you can see, the setData() method takes two arguments: The data type and the data itself. In this case, the data is simply the innerHTML of the dragged element. This is the first step in transferring data: Setting the data, which happens when the element is initially dragged.

The next key line in my code will be using the getData() method. In this case, I'll use it when the drop event is triggered on my drop area element:

The data that I'll be grabbing is text that represents a valid CSS color keyword, which will be inside each draggable element. The data could be a lot of things, but in this case I'm just using some text for demo purposes. And as you can see, the text sets the background color of the drop area element.

See the full working demo here

There's naturally a lot more code there, but it's fairly straightforward. I'm looping over the draggable boxes to add the event listeners to each one. The setData() and getData() methods are used within that loop to obtain and apply the color info.

Try dragging any of the boxes into the drop area to see the background of the drop area change. You can even try changing the HTML to use different colors (any valid CSS color value will work). As long as the color is valid, the background of the drop area element will change to that color.

And that's a basic way to use the dataTransfer object when working with the Drag and Drop API.
 

Now on to this week's tools!
 

JavaScript Utilities

Working From Home? Try Team.Video
Team.video makes it easier and faster for remote teams to work together by offering user friendly video meetings with agendas, collaborative notes, and emoji responses. No download required and it’s free to use.   via Syndicate

Van11y
Bit of an older project that I just discovered. A collection of customizable, accessible scripts for rich interface elements, built using progressive enhancement.

Rsup Progress
A simple progress bar with promises support.

Heapify
A very fast JavaScript priority queue, implemented using a binary heap, with no dependencies.

Nano Events
Simple and tiny (72 bytes) event emitter library for JavaScript.

Chardin.js
Simple overlay instructions for your apps. Kind of like those 'app tour' plugins, but just a single overlay pointing stuff out.

Serialize JavaScript
Serialize JavaScript to a superset of JSON that includes regular expressions and functions.

FullCalendar
A JavaScript calendar plugin, great for displaying events with drag-and-drop capabilities and an API for extending its functionality.

defu
Utility to recursively assign default properties.

Clack
A modern keyboard shortcut library written in Typescript.

Sharect.js
A lightweight (2.9Kb gzipped and minified) JavaScript library to let users share text selections to social networks in desktop browsers (like Medium).

Uppload
A better JavaScript image uploader. Highly customizable with 30+ plugins, open-source, and can be used with any file uploading back end.

Media Tools (SVG, Video, Audio, etc.)

Beginner JavaScript by Wes Bos is 50% Off!
The master package includes 88 HD videos, part of 15 modules – and course updates are free forever.   promoted 

mediasoup
Cutting-edge WebRTC video conferencing. The perfect choice for building multi-party video conferencing and real-time streaming apps.

gifcap
Create animated GIFs in your browser from a screen recording. Client-side only, no data is uploaded.

Tabler Icons
A set of over 400 free MIT-licensed high-quality SVG icons for you to use in your web projects. Each icon is designed on a 24x24 grid and a 2px stroke.

Video Puppet
Using a markdown file, create a video (with captions) from a chosen set of images, audio files and smaller video clips.

Exifr
The fastest and most versatile JavaScript EXIF reading library.

Seamless Pattern Generator
Create seamless, repeatable royalty free patterns for your website, or to download as SVG, JPEG or PNG.

Resoundly
Produce a podcast simply by typing the content and this app will convert it to speech.

Spline
Easily create 3D web experiences without coding. Build and iterate fast with production-ready results.

Photo Stream
Self-hosted, super simple photo stream. Built with Ruby and seems to require either Netlify or Jekyll.

Ionicons
Premium designed icons for use in web, iOS, Android, and desktop apps. Support for SVG and web font.

The Uncategorizables

Advanced React & GraphQL by Wes Bos is 50% Off!
The master package includes 68 HD videos, part of 10 modules – and course updates are free forever.   promoted 

Brim
Desktop application to efficiently search large packet captures and logs from Zeek (the network security monitoring tool).

StartNames
Produces brandable ideas for domain names in a Twitter stream, based on actual domains that are for sale.

WMS Everywhere
Chrome extension to help you research search volume, advertising cost per click, and related keywords inside Google search results – free and on-demand.

PDF.js Express
Add a PDF.js viewer with out-of-the-box annotation, PDF form fill, and signing. Based on Mozilla's PDF.js (for parsing and rendering PDFs).

AsyncAPI
Open source tools to easily build and maintain your event-driven architecture. All powered by the AsyncAPI specification, the industry standard for defining asynchronous APIs.

Weglot
Allows you to make your website multilingual in minutes and to manage all your translations effortlessly.

Our Site Updates
An easy way to post updates to your website (e.g. via easy to install banners) and keep visitors informed.

RightFont
An innovative, beautiful and professional font manager app for Mac, helping designers preview, install, sync, and manage their font files.

PingPong
Remote user interviews and user tests made simple.

Extract Article Text
Lets you easily extract boilerplate-free text from news articles, blogs, press releases, and company pages with a single API request.

Commerce
Drop‑in e‑commerce for any website with a single line of code. Serverless, real‑time, and API‑first.

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Made something? Send links via Direct Message on Twitter @WebToolsWeekly (details here). No tutorials or articles, please. If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, feel free to reply to this email.
 

Before I Go...

This is amazing: Open and Shut lets you send messages in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut. So if you've been kidnapped and forced to give up all your passwords or something...?

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@WebToolsWeekly
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Continuing on the theme of dealing with HTML's Drag and Drop API, another thing you're able to do with this API is set a custom image that appears during any drag operation.

Normally when you drag a draggable element, the browser will by default display a mini version of the dragged object, which appears next to the user's cursor. In most cases, this is acceptable and is probably the desired behavior. But if you want you can change that image using the setDragImage() method of the dataTransfer object.

Here's the code:

Notice a few things:

• I'm creating an image using the Image() constructor. I could also use document.createElement('img') for this
• I'm setting the image's src attribute to point to my image
• I'm using setDragImage() inside the event listener for the dragstart event

• The image to use during the drag operation
• The horizontal (x) offset relative to the mouse pointer
• The vertical (y) offset relative to the mouse pointer

Now on to this week's tools!
 

CSS and HTML Tools

Real-Time Chat at Your Fingertips
Stream Chat offers a variety of SDKs and pre-built components to help integrate real-time chat and messaging into your application in as little as a couple of days. Sign up now for a free 28-day trial – no credit card required.  via Paved 

CSS Scan
Now at version 2. Chrome or Firefox extension. An alternative to using inspect element to edit and debug CSS. Check the CSS of any element on hover, instantly, and copy its entire rules with a single click.

CSS Color Gradient Generator
Customize your own gradient or choose a gradient from a predefined gallery.

Color Ninja
A color palette and color scheme manager for Mac.

BEM Naming Cheat Sheet
A nicely designed guide to using the BEM naming method for your stylesheets.

sass-link
Use SCSS almost like regular CSS. It parses the link and style tags of your document, compiles them using sass.js and injects the compiled CSS back into the document.

CSS Builder
Live CSS editing tool to fiddle with various CSS properties including shadows, border-radius, filters, typography, and lots more.

MVP.css
A minimalist stylesheet for HTML elements. No class names, no frameworks, just semantic HTML and you're done.

tailwindcss-standalone
Standalone build of Tailwind CSS that runs in the browser. I'm assuming the idea here is that you don't need a build process to use it.

Buttono
A flexible Sass mixin for creating BEM-style buttons.

CSS Specificity Calculator
Interactive tool to better understand CSS specificity. Provides a specificity score along with number of IDs, classes, and element selectors used. Also allows deep linking to whatever selector you enter.

glaze
CSS-in-JS micro-library for making design systems approachable.

JavaScript Utilities

ES6 for Everyone by Wes Bos is 50% Off!
The master package includes 77 HD videos, part of 21 modules – and course updates are free forever.   promoted 

Flip
A nice looking flip-animation timer component that you can add to your website to include a countdown (e.g. for a product launch).

ASScroll
A hybrid smooth scroll setup that combines the performance gains of virtual scroll with the reliability of native scroll. See the two example links in the readme for a demo, which is pretty cool but definitely not for every project.

prerender.js
Another option to preload links before the user clicks them.

Universal Model
A unified state management solution for Angular, React, Svelte, and Vue.

Zod
TypeScript-first schema validation with static type inference.

Prerender
Allows your JavaScript website to be crawled perfectly by search engines. This tool renders the JavaScript in a browser, saves the static HTML, and you return that to the crawlers.

gretchen
Making fetch happen in TypeScript.

sort-isostring
A tiny (110B) and fast utility to sort ISO 8601 date strings.

uid
A tiny (134B) and fast utility to generate randomized output strings of fixed length using lowercase alphanumeric characters.

Checkboxland
Peak weirdness here. A JavaScript library for rendering anything as HTML checkboxes. Yes, that's right.

Routine
An inline, promise-based wrapper around Web Workers.

Build Tools, Bundlers, etc.

Advanced React & GraphQL by Wes Bos is 50% Off!
The master package includes 68 HD videos, part of 10 modules – and course updates are free forever.   promoted 

npm Dependency Visualizer
Enter the name of any npm package and this tool will display a visual showing its dependencies.

Pipedream
An integration platform built for developers. Develop any workflow, based on any trigger. Workflows are code, which you can run for free. No server or cloud resources to manage.

Rome
An experimental JavaScript toolchain. A compiler, linter, formatter, bundler, testing framework, and more.

Destiny
Prettier for File Structures. Scans a folder for all the files in it and creates a graph based on how the JavaScript/TypeScript files import each other.

Prettier
The popular code formatting tool is now at version 2.

Worth It
Enter a URL and this tool will analyze a page to determine how much less JavaScript is downloaded in modern browsers as a result of it using the module/nomodule pattern.

rollup.js
The popular module bundler for JavaScript apps is now at version 2+.

scriptlint
Enforceable standards for your package.json scripts – like ESLint for npm run. The idea here is to o enable people to use memorable and consistent script names across their projects.

Tray.io
Quickly integrate software applications using powerful automated workflows. Easily build and streamline processes using a beautifully designed visual workflow editor.

Unminify
Free online tool to unminify (unpack, deobfuscate) JavaScript, CSS, and HTML code, making it readable and pretty.

A Tweet for Thought

Send Me Your Tools!

Made something? Send links via Direct Message on Twitter @WebToolsWeekly (details here). No tutorials or articles, please. If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, feel free to reply to this email.
 

Before I Go...

Bizarrely, someone has created a project that aims to name each of the web's 16.7 million colors: colornames.org. I guess with so much remote time on our hands, this is as good a time as any to attempt this.

Thanks to everyone for subscribing and reading!

Keep tooling,
Louis
webtoolsweekly.com
@WebToolsWeekly
PayPal.me/WebToolsWeekly

When creating interfaces using HTML's Drag and Drop API (various aspects of which I've covered in recent issues), it's important to note that some elements on a web page are already 'draggable' by default. And you've no doubt noticed this. The spec explains that the following elements are draggable by default:

• A text selection
• An image
• An `a` element with an `href` attribute

In other words, the browser will automatically set the draggable value to true or false based on what kind of element it is. Try this CodePen demo to see the effect in action. Notice a few things in the demo:

• No draggable attributes on the three elements
• I'm using the Window.getSelection() method to get the selected text after the drag operation begins
• I'm using preventDefault() when the drop is made to ensure the browser doesn't think something suspicious is happening. If I didn't include this, you'd see a warning before the browser tries to navigate to whatever you drag.

Now on to this week's tools!
 

Front-end Frameworks

A No-Code Drag and Drop Form Builder
Get a lifetime membership to 123FormBuilder's Gold plan for a one-time fee of $39.99 (usually $299.88/year). 20 forms/month, 5000 submissions/month, 1000+ form templates, integration with Google Sheets, MailChimp, Dropbox, and more.  promoted 

HTML / Sass Jumpstart
Minimal, themeable, and scalable Sass/HTML template site. Powered by node-sass and includes stylelint, Prettier, and Autoprefixer, hot-reload via Browsersync.

H3
A microframework to build client-side single-page applications (SPAs) in modern JavaScript.

Fast Cart
A Woocommerce PWA platform for building fast loading, mobile-friendly e-commerce websites.

98.css
A CSS library for building retro interfaces that look like Windows 98.

Shorthand
A utility-based CSS framework that allows you to make unique and modern designs without writing any CSS.

Reactron
A tiny Electron project configured to work with React as the front end. The project has the minimum code necessary to start a new app.

Orbit
An open source design system that includes a whole slew of components and utilities for use in your next travel-based app or website.

vue-composable
General purpose Vue Composition API composable and reactive components written in TypeScript.

Hook
A dark HTML landing page template built with the aforementioned Shorthand CSS framework.

LitElement Starter Template
A minimal starter template for a web components app built with LitElement, TypeScript, and Parcel for bundling.

Reach UI
A set of React components to build accessible React-based design systems.

Testing and Debugging Tools

ES6 for Everyone by Wes Bos is 50% Off!
The master package includes 77 HD videos, part of 21 modules – and course updates are free forever.   promoted 

Eruda
Now at version 2+. A console for testing and debugging on mobile browsers.

CursedChrome
This can be used for malicious purposes, so be wary. A Chrome-extension implant that turns victim Chrome browsers into fully-functional HTTP proxies, allowing you to browse sites as your victims.

postMessage-tracker
A Chrome extension to track postMessage usage (URL, domain, and stack) both by logging using CORS and also visually as an extension icon.

Tempomat
Native macOS app for monitoring continuous integration systems.

Will it CORS?
Test if a URL is CORS friendly (i.e. it's safe to send and the response can be read).

Pointer Latency
Tests the delay of pointermove events in the current web browser and demonstrates the usefulness/uselessness of pointer prediction.

axios
A well-known tool but I've never included it here. A Promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.

FinDOM-XSS
A fast and simple DOM based XSS vulnerability scanner via a Shell script.

EventReduce Browser Demo
A browser demo where the EventReduce algorithm is used in different browser databases so you can test out the performance gains of different queries.

Insomnia
Now at version 7+. API design platform plus REST and GraphQL client.

JavaScript Utilities

Advanced React & GraphQL by Wes Bos is 50% Off!
The master package includes 68 HD videos, part of 10 modules – and course updates are free forever.   promoted 

emoji-regex
A regular expression to match all Emoji-only symbols as per the Unicode Standard.

Hegel
An advanced static type checker for JavaScript with optional type annotations and is able to prevent runtime type errors.

Rosetta
A general purpose internationalization library in 292 bytes.

SAMD
A tiny, static AMD API implementation that allows including AMD modules in regular script tags.

Flipswitch.js
Pure ES6 library for clipping fixed positioned elements on scroll.

useMemoValue()
Reuse the previous version of a value unless it has changed.

Notyf
A small (~3KB) JavaScript library for toast notifications. Responsive, accessible, dependency-free, and easy to integrate with React, Angular and Vue.

gen-esm-wrapper
CLI tool that makes it easier for module authors to support both ES modules and CommonJS modules for Node.js.

prray
'Promisified' Array, compatible with normal arrays, but comes with support for async methods (e.g. mapAsync).

qrcode-generator
QR code generator implementation in JavaScript, Java, and more.

A Tweet for Thought

Send Me Your Tools!

Made something? Send links via Direct Message on Twitter @WebToolsWeekly (details here). No tutorials or articles, please. If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, feel free to reply to this email.
 

Before I Go...

Miss the office? Say no more.

Thanks to everyone for subscribing and reading!

Keep tooling,
Louis
webtoolsweekly.com
@WebToolsWeekly
PayPal.me/WebToolsWeekly