Re: CSS and copy/pasting guidelines

On Fri, Apr 1, 2016 at 5:30 PM, Johannes Wilm <johannes@fiduswriter.org> wrote:
> So, if we are proposing three different paste versions:

Well, we have two different plaintext options but need to pick one..

> - A. plaintext exactly as was
> - B. plaintext with some intelligence applied

Not sure exactly which one you consider "as was" in this context - the
case the user sees, or the case in the source code :)

> I wonder:
> - How difficult (or impossible) is it to obtain the same output as A or B if
> one has access to C?

This should be trivial, really - at least if we assume all paste
targets that understand HTML also have a basic understanding of CSS.

> Would it be possible to just have either A or B
> browserside and let the client calculate the other one in JS?

I'm not following you here. You can certainly go from *C* to either A
or B. You can *not* go from A to B or vice versa without having the
formatting details preserved in C to refer to.

Also, that "client" may not run JS - if you paste into an instance of
a good ol' desktop word processing application for example, the input
will probably be handled by compiled C(++) code, not JS.

A client getting C *can* choose to derive A or B - but we certainly do
not want to say the UA must *only* place HTML+CSS, not plaintext
equivalent, on the clipboard in this scenario. Copying from a web page
and not being able to paste into Notepad would just be weird.

> - if we have both A and B, how do we decide which one to use in places that
> only allow plaintext input?

That's exactly the challenge we're discussing.
-Hallvord R.

Received on Monday, 4 April 2016 11:46:30 UTC