javascript - How do I prevent drag on a child, but allow drag on the parent?

Question

I have a div which the user can drag, inside that div is a span with some text which I want to allow the user to select (thus they cannot drag it). How do I allow the div to drag, but not the span?

The dragstart event is on the div.

I'm probably overlooking something simple. I tried draggable=true on the div, and draggable=false on the span. That didn't work. Tried returning false on dragstart, that didn't work either.

dragstart (roughly):

var jTarget = $(e.target);
if ((jTarget.is('div.header') || (jTarget.parents('div.header')) 
       && !jTarget.is('a, input, span'))) 
{
   e.originalEvent.dataTransfer.setData("Text", "test");
}
else
{
   if(e.preventBubble)
      e.preventBubble();
   if(e.stopPropagation)
      e.stopPropagation();
   return false;//???
}

The if else portion works as I expect, but I cannot get anything to stop the drag and allow the select.

Answer 1

If you want to truly cancel out the drag and make it unnoticeable to parent drag handlers, you need to both preventDefault and stopPropagation:

<div draggable="true" ondragstart="console.log('dragging')">
    <span>Drag me! :)</span>
    <input draggable="true"
           ondragstart="event.preventDefault();
                        event.stopPropagation();"
           value="Don't drag me :(">
</div>

Without the stopPropagation, the parent ondragstart will still be called even if the default behavior will be prevented (event.defaultPrevented == true). If you have code in that handler that doesn't handle this case, you may see subtle bugs.

You can of course put the JavaScript above inside element.addEventListener('dragstart', ...) too.