Re: Clipboard (cut, drag, drop, etc) draft

Here's a few remarks that strike me at first:

- I'm missing  a copy-event... or do you really want to be as 
MSIE-follower so as not having such and rely on the old method that 
write directly to a clipboard singleton. If wishing to do so, I 
recommend we try to follow Safari's way and spec [1] which actually 
states that reading/writing from/to clipboard is only open when in the 
middle of achieving the paste/copy commands

- you seem not to speak about standard gestures although this is 
fundamental in order to describe when a UA is expected to invoke the 
copy and paste mechanisms. I would suggest to add this within the 
security considerations by qualifying that the copy, paste, drag, and 
drop operations should only be triggered when the UA has recognized, by 
a standard gesture, that the user intended consciously to start these 
operations.

Some more work I've been doing on the topic has been presented at the 
MathUI workshop, see [2]. Among these articles I tried to make clear 
that the differences between CnP and DnD that copy needs to store all 
possible translations to the clipboard whereas in DnD there is 
content-type negotiation at drop time (between the source and target) 
and that only then the content-translation occurs.
It might be possible to escape this description in this note but I think 
it is a fundamental one and expect, for example, that it should be 
possible for a drop operation to actually trigger a server request. A 
simple example of that would be the transfer of a formula into a 
graphical programme where, eg, something like a bitmap could be 
generated from the MathML (definitely needs layout capabilities of a 
server).
So I would suggest to separate well clipboard/copy-and-paste and 
dataTransfer/drag-and-drop.

Maybe we should characterize how much further than MDT this note wishes 
to go ?
Support for any mime-types, I think, is certainly a first step that's 
wished or ?
Late translation of DnD is also one, I hope.

hope that helps.
May I suggest concrete text bits ?

paul

[1] Introduction to Safari JavaScript Programming Topics
 http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/SafariJSProgTopics/
[2] http://www.activemath.org/~paul/pubs/LJ-CnP-mathui06.html

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:18:31 -0000, Paul Libbrecht 
> <paul@activemath.org> wrote:
>> While browsing the document, my firefox 1.5 is asking me to manually
>> install an unknown plugin... is this something I should trust ? ;-)
> Oh, there is a MathML example in there. No, feel free to ignore it. 
> I'll check that I have reasonable fallback presentation too, and find 
> out what makes the W3C server send the right MIME type (if I recall, 
> Firefox is supposed to support MathML).
Firefox does for sure but I don't know the right way with the object tag 
and html 4... the Math WG has always tended to say that MathML should 
with as included elements within an XML document. I am not sure it'll 
work with HTML 4...
Anything against using xhtml in this document ?