Designed for delight, built for performance: The journey of pragmatic drag and drop

This post details the creation and adoption of 'Pragmatic Drag and Drop', a new, modular, open-source drag and drop solution. It emphasizes performance gains by leveraging browser primitives and providing optional components, visual consistency through a design framework and Figma tooling, and accessibility by enabling assistive technologies to achieve the same outcomes as pointer-based operations. The solution decouples design and behavior outputs, allowing for independent iteration. It contrasts with the older 'react-beautiful-dnd' by using lines, borders, and background color changes instead of relying solely on movement animations for placement communication, and by offering action menus for assistive technologies to achieve outcomes.