Re: request for custom clipboard types (Re: clipboard events)

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 22:57, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa@webkit.org> wrote:

> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 9:34 PM, Hallvord R. M. Steen <hallvord@opera.com>wrote:
>
>>  On Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:25:20 +0900, Paul Libbrecht <paul@activemath.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> A website maker for, say, a shop for furnitures that knows they can go
>>> into "my home plan maker" through the clipboard will want to be able to
>>> produce and export a clipboard flavor that is unknown to both browser
>>> implementors and spec makers now.
>>> Provided the user may say that the format is "safe" (safe as a picture
>>> for example), he would be able to drag-and-drop the furniture and get a 3D
>>> view inside "my home plan maker".
>>>
>>
>> I can see there are some really nice and tempting use cases. The problem
>> is the serious downsides.. I would however assume that if we support placing
>> a main XML (or JSON) payload plus alternate- or sub-parts on the clipboard,
>> many custom formats and applications would be able to do their custom
>> business in XML or JSON plus binary blobs. What do you think?
>>
>
> I'm also concerned that website may access sensitive information such as
> local file path and user name via clipboard if we allow arbitrary format.
>
> - Ryosuke
>

An XML + JSON payload seems reasonable, but I wonder how long it would take
for native apps to interop with web apps. My original plan for adding custom
MIME type support to Chromium was to avoid security issues by confining the
custom types inside Chromium--they'd work when dragging/dropping or
copying/pasting within the browser, but wouldn't be visible to, say,
Photoshop. Ideally, there'd be cooperation about the browser vendors so it'd
even work across different browsers.

Daniel