Re: clipboard events

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 3:25 AM, Paul Libbrecht <paul@activemath.org> wrote:
>
> Le 31 janv. 2011 à 11:39, Daniel Cheng a écrit :
> > The way I'm working on implementing it (for drag and drop, though it
> applies to copy and paste as well), arbitrary strings would not be
> accessible from a non-DOM application, e.g. a native app like Word or
> Photoshop. Only a set of known MIME types would be automatically converted
> to the corresponding native type.
>
> This is really really a hard task that I wish neither the spec nor browsers
> implement. Here's a use case that I would find usefully implemented by this
> spec.
>
> 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".
>

How do we make sure it works across different platforms?  I don't think we
should be encouraging authors to create website that only works with
applications on a particular platform.

Le 26 janv. 2011 à 06:26, Hallvord R. M. Steen a écrit :
> > It intends to, but this has two open issues:
> > * I assume that many OS clipboard implementations have an enumerated list
> of "known" formats,
>
> Just a few of them. (I'm trying to maintain pointers to that here:
> http://eds.activemath.org/transfers-literature )
>
> > I'm not sure if all OSes can handle a request to push "text/foobar" data
> to the clipboard.
>
> Not an arbitrary mime-type, an arbitrary flavour conforming to the
> platform's specifics.


> > Does anyone know if we can rely on such functionality being truly
> cross-platform?
>
> Do you mean a mapping from mime-type? No they are unfortunately extremely
> platform specific.
>

This is the problem.  If the format is platform-specific, we'll be exposing
platform-dependent API to the Web.  If we are to allow arbitrary data types,
then I would really like to provide an abstraction around it so that the Web
authors don't have to detect platform and do different things for each
platform.  And if that's unpractical or impossible, then we shouldn't allow
arbitrary data types.

- Ryosuke