nestable.css is overly onerous about nestable2 HOT 9 OPEN

It's not just colors. You've got fonts, sizes, line heights. The worst is what happens when you start dragging something, because everything the user defines is lost. You shouldn't be providing styles to anything; use the classes just to identify elements (e.g., handles). Look at jQuery sortable as an example. There is also no apparent reason to need to provide the dd, dd-item, dd-list, dd-handle (except as an override): they can be determined from the initial selection (or, to allow for the bizarre cases, only assign them if they're not already assigned). After being constantly frustrated with trying to use my own styling I wrote a version of nestable just using jquery sortable (by adding sublists to each list item and using the multiple list option). It took maybe a half dozen lines of code and, admittedly still needed a little tweaking, but it was workable (not to the level of nestable2, but at least it didn't fall apart with custom styles).

I like it well enough to use it; it works. It's just that I'm forced to make my lists conform to your (the generic 'your') concept of 'style,' and for that reason I will continue to look for alternatives.

I don't remember what I changed to prevent the items from disappearing when dragged outside the list but it was related to a missing dd class up top. More on that below. Nestable runs, mostly, when one doesn't supply it's CSS file (acts like sortable - no nesting [maybe not; turns out my list is now acting that way with the full file]), which supports my argument that it is onerous. Look at the first dd definition: max-width, font-size, line-height? Why? Almost everything is unnecessary> dd-handle height, color, font-weight, border, background, radius? The thing about taste is that everything thinks their's is great. My lists contain other elements: text fields, buttons, etc. When dragging, any styling I have goes away, presumably because it's relative to the list (e.g., div > ol > li input[type=...]) and not having a class definition on each element. Not unreasonable (and sortable manages). One big problem is that I have handlers attached to those elements and they get eaten by the drag handler. As a result, I have to have a dedicated drag area and not the entire dd-item (again, sortable handles this). Finally, and I mentioned this earlier, why can't you just dynamically add the classes you need? My lists are generated dynamically, without any class definitions. My invocation is (basically): $('#whatever').html(html) .addClass('dd') .find('ol').addClass('dd-list') .find('li').addClass('dd-item ui-state-default') .find('div>span').addClass('dd-handle') .parents('.dd') .nestable(... I haven't look closely at the code, but it's curious that the invocation is on the container and not the actual list. I guess, in theory, your list could be a series of divs or other blocks: <div class="dd"> <div class="dd-list"> <div class="dd-item"> <div containing something with a dd-handle> but that would seem a little perverse, not to mention unmanageable (and a really terrible coding practice). But in any case everything is pretty much known so nestable should be able to add the classes at invocation. Got to go. Just discovered my lists won't indent anymore. Discovered it when I was trying to find a minimum nestable.css. Probably got a color wrong.

I'm not; it was just a statement and I said it was theoretically possible but a bizarre concept.