RE: MathML and "Clipboard API and events"

Web Applications Working Group,

Greetings. 
 With regard to MathML and clipboard API and events, some clipboarding 
and interprocess communication API topics include:


(1) The use of JavaScript callback functions or interfaces with the DataTransfer interface (http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/editing.html#the-datatransfer-interface); WebIDL includes syntax for callback functions (http://www.w3.org/TR/WebIDL/#dfn-callback-function) and interfaces (http://www.w3.org/TR/WebIDL/#dfn-callback-interface). 
 An earlier letter discussing the topic was RE: [Clipboard] 
Mathematical Proofs in HTML5 Documents (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2012AprJun/0041.html).

(2) The use of XInclude (http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/) in clipboarding and interprocess communication with RFC2392 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2392.txt)
 in such a way that clipboard content with such XML can be 
differentiated from from clipboard-related uses of such XML.

(3)
 Provenance data interoperable with bibliographic referencing systems and document 
authoring software in clipboarding and interprocess communication.

A solution for clipboarding arbitrary 
selections of hypertext which can include MathML, which can include 
parallel markup, is the use of XInclude in the clipboarded hypertext.  
In addition to backwards compatible clipboarding, with "text/html" and 
"application/xhtml+xml", we could also utilize content type parameters, 
for instance "text/html; ...=..." and "application/xhtml+xml; ...=...", 
which could indicate to clipboard consumers the use of XInclude and 
RFC2392 in interprocess communication.

That is, from an arbitrary selection of hypertext document content including:

<p>This
 sentence has mathematics in it <math 
...>...</math>.</p>

we can envision something on the clipboard like:

<p>This sentence has mathematics in it <include xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude" href="..." />.</p>

where
 the URI scheme of the XInclude's @href could be as per RFC2392 so as to
 indicate content from another clipboard resource, which could have a 
"multipart/alternative" content type, and content types such as: 
"application/mathml-presentation+xml", "application/mathml-content+xml",
 and/or "application/mathml+xml", as well as other formats and content 
based upon processing any parallel content (http://www.w3.org/TR/MathML3/chapter5.html) in the MathML.

Pasting
 would then be a bit more complex, scanning for such XInclude elements, and 
assembling content utilizing formats known to the pasting application.



Kind regards,

Adam Sobieski