Many of the interactions I'm working on aren't about dragging elements, but instead using the drag motion to do some action. I also had trouble getting the drag-and-drop API to work inside SVG elements. I think it's solving a different problem than what I'm trying to use it for.

I'm not Amit, but from the article:

> Note that this is not the HTML Drag and Drop API, which involves dragging an element onto another element. For my diagrams, I’m dragging but not dropping, and the scrubbable number example shows how I’m not necessarily even moving something around. So I need to read the mouse/touch events directly.

The drag and drop API is doing a different thing that isn't always appropriate - you can get it to do roughly what this article is talking about by making the thing being dragged invisible just after the dragging starts, but it can shrink things and doesn't let you edit them as DOM nodes after the dragging has started. It also lets you drag something out of the browser window and try to put it into a completely different window.