Re: CSS21 16.5 Capitalization text-transform

> I find in a number of browsers, that if text-transform is used to change case,

It doesn't change the case, only how it is displayed.

> and a user highlights and copies the text to the clipboard (on Windows anyway),
> the text that is placed in the clipboard is the original text (ie without case
> changes) not the properly cased text displayed in the highlighted region.

I don't think that this should be within the scope of CSS.  I would
expect, though, that what goes onto the clipboard should depend on the
clipboard format used.  Many tools create multiple clip board versions.
I would expect the plain text version (the one that notepad will use)
to be the text as sent, minimally formatted.  If there is a suitable
rich text format that can support the forced uppercase attribute, I would
expect that version to have the original case, plus the attribute and for
rich text type tools to convert it to their own attribute representation,
retaining the original case.  Of course, such a rich text aware tool,
that didn't have a corresponding attribute, could chose to destroy the
capitalisation information in preference to destroying the information
from the attribute.

Forcing the case in CSS is not an alternative to using caps lock when
keying the text in.  An alternative style sheet may not force the
case, and the text should be written so that it is capitalised in
a way that is correct if represented with no transformation.

Actually, it would seem to me fairly reasonable that an HTML browser
should create one of its clip board formats as (an operating system
specific) format that is very similar to HTML plus CSS, to preserve
as much as possible of the information from the original document.
That might be seen as undesirable by some content publishers as it
might reduce the technical knowledge needed to plagiarize.  On the
other hand, various arguments about whether inline styles are really
needed seem to be based on the assumption that such copy as HTML
operations will be provided.

Received on Thursday, 16 October 2003 17:41:49 UTC