"declarative" copy-and-paste operations?

	
Hello WebAPIers,

as you probably noticed, MathML-3 has published a draft recently.

Among the novelties are a section which describes clipboard handling  
of MathML content. This is the section 7.2:
   http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML3/chapter7.html#world-int-transfers

Basically, this section describes how a User-Agent should handle the  
"transfer" (copy, drag,...) of a MathML-expression whose root is the  
semantics element along with various "annotation" elements as  
children : each annotation describes an alternate representation of  
the core expression. UAs that copy such an expression should then  
copy the alternate representations as an extra transfer-flavour.
An example markup is below.

This allows simple markup to contain alternate data-flavours in case  
things get into the clip-board. These data-flavours may need be  
requested separately.



I think this offers a way to markup producers to have their users  
enjoy a rich copy facility, something that I would consider enough  
for many cases and might replace the clipboard operations  
specification in its goal... except for input.

For input, maybe there's a simple solution close to a list of flavour- 
names that a text-field could accept as pasted in?

what do you think?

paul





   <math>
    <mfrac>
    <semantics>
      <mroot>
        <mi>k</mi>
        <mrow><mi>a</mi><mo>+<mo><mi>b</mi></mrow>
      </mroot>
      <annotation-xml encoding="MathML-Content">....</annotation-xml>
      <annotation href="../fRender?coord=1723;type=png"  
encoding="image/png"/>
      <annotation href="../fRender?coord=1723;type=tex"  
encoding="text/tex"/>
      <annotation href="../fRender?coord=1723;type=maple"  
encoding="text/maple"/>
    </semantics>
    <mi>k</mi>
    </mfrac>
   </math>