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[Dorf and Dumb]

The drop-shaft is routine enough, but in order to go the other way there should be an option to build a float/raft/boat/something on a water tile.  As the water fills a tile, the float automatically goes up.  And anything dropped on the float... stays on the float.

[Manveru Taurënér]

More advanced fluid simulation, rafts, boats etc are all planned. There's a lot more about it in the DFtalks, but this quote has most of it covered at least ^^

Rainseeker:   How is the fluid model going to change?
Toady:   We have hopes there. I guess there are two things ... one of them has a couple of sections ... but two things that are important are floating objects and additional fluid types. So for floating objects right now all the material have densities and they also have sizes and whatever other physical properties you might need, so it can tell, you know 'is this object going to float?' in water or magma. There are some issues there but it's not an impossible problem, you kind of worry when people use quantum stockpiles if they take a bunch of logs and drop five thousand of them in the same square and then that square suddenly gets wet is the CPU going to die? Maybe. But it's not like there needs to be a super lot of calculation going on because if it knows the density of the object to begin with ... I don't know if we're going to have to worry about shapes as well, like if an object has a concave shape the density isn't the only variable that's important ... but getting an object to float, especially for water which is so important, is just something that can be known about the object, it could just be a flag on the object so it doesn't have to do any calculation at all except for the actual floatation. As for that it just depends how you want it to work. There's some other trickiness; if your tile is two out of seven water with a seven out of seven below it, so it's actually bone fide water, it's not just a puddle, does the item float in the two out of seven square? Does it float in the seven out of seven square? What if you have a one of seven, what if you have a zero out of seven with a seven out of seven below it? Which square does it sit in is part of the problem of having this quantized space where you have a tile here and then a tile here and then a tile here, you want to decide where your item rests. Then there's the matter of having currents - the water has a direction that it's supposed to be flowing in even if the tiles aren't actually changing - the objects then can move and that's not really a big process or problem or anything, depending on how many objects you're actually monitoring, or how many squares you're monitoring if you want to monitor it by object or tile, there's a lot of different ways you can look at the problem. Just basically it's not a super hard problem, and then it would be really cool to flood a room and have everything either - depending on how heavy it is - just to get pushed along or float up and float out and go wherever you want it to go, I'm sure there'd be a lot of applications that would come out of that, for people that are doing all kinds of strange things.
Rainseeker:   It would be a good reason to have all stone furniture in that case.
Toady:   Yeah. The other problem that I was going to mention ... well one of the sub-problems I was going to mention for liquids was boats; boats are important once you get to fluids. Then you've almost got like a cave-in problem; does this multi-tile thing that you've built, perhaps tile by tile, and in whatever shape; does it float? And if so how deep does the boat float and how much of it shows above the surface of the water. It could do that, once it understands the boat as a multi-tile object that's not so hard to calculate, because you have the total mass of the boat and how many air tiles dip down at each level, those kind of things are pretty easily calculated, it would just be a known quantity for that boat and then you could stick it in the water. If you have some giant galleon or something you'd have a couple of tiles below the surface of the water and a couple of tiles above the surface of the water, and you can just walk around on it and stuff; it'd be really cool.

[Dorf and Dumb]

Honestly, that sounds waaay too complicated.  The dorfs seem to be able to make pretty near anything out of anything.  Maybe making a massive barge out of rock coffers is too much a stretch, but I'd say that if they can make a bridge that can hold 5000 stones they might as well make a huge sealed wooden box that 5000 rocks can land on top of.

[Ramaraunt]

Yes parade floats would be a great idea.