Re: [Clipboard] Web API for clipboard changes.

On 6/2/15 4:05 PM, Kelvin Poon wrote:
>
> Hi public-webapps
>
>
> We are exploring a new web API for content to be notified of clipboard 
> changes and would like to discuss it here.
>
>
> The problem
>
> For certain classes of web apps, it is necessary to determine when new 
> clipboard contents have been set, e.g. in order to fetch and display 
> them, to update context menus, or synchronize the content with another 
> application or device.
>
>
> The problem is that the web standard currently provides no explicit 
> notifications when new content is copied from another application to 
> the clipboard.  As a result, these web apps typically re-fetch the 
> clipboard every time they regain focus, and only act on the contents 
> if they have changed since last time (e.g. passing it to a remote 
> system, updating context menu, etc).  This polling mechanism is 
> generally inefficient, especially when the clipboard contains a large 
> image file.
>
>
> We currently have interest from Citrix and Chrome Remote Experience 
> teams in improving Chrome's clipboard support.
>
>
> The proposal
>
> Google propose to update the W3C Clipboard API and events 
> specification <http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/>with an 
> onClipboardChangedevent on the document object.  The user agent should 
> only signal the event if
>
> 1. a frame re-gains focus AND
>
> 2. the clipboard has changed since it last had focus.
>
>
> In addition, the user agent should not signal clipboard change events 
> while a frame has focus.  This will relieve the web app from the 
> burden of filtering out notifications in response to clipboard changes 
> generated by the app itself.
>
>
> We think this new API will avoid fetching large clipboard content 
> repeatedly and unnecessarily for clipboard changes.
>
> Does the community think this API would be useful?
>

Hallvord, All - do you have any feedback for Kevlin?

> We can go into more details and work on a detailed design together if 
> the community is interested.
>

Kelvin, if there is a resource that includes details, please let us 
know. (I suppose another option is a Pull Request but it might make 
sense to first wait for some feedback from the group.)

-Thanks, ArtB

Received on Thursday, 11 June 2015 10:57:58 UTC