Re: [clipboard] Add RTF to the "mandatory data types" list?

I assume that mandating all engines have built-in RTF parsers/converters to
translate back and forth between RTF and HTML is going too far.. Apparently
IE did / does just that, but even so it seems like RTF is generally fading
away.

Would it be a possible compromise to let a script describe data as RTF, and
then put said data on the clipboard with the OS's correct RTF data type
labelling? And vice versa, if the script asks for RTF give it any RTF
contents from the clipboard as raw (binary) data? Products and environments
that desperately need clipboard RTF support could then implement their own
parsers and converters in JS and write/read RTF - the rest of us avoid some
browser bloat.. Is this level of "support" reasonable?
-Hallvord R

On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 8:49 PM, James M. Greene <james.m.greene@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Aug 20, 2014 4:19 AM, "Daniel Cheng" <dcheng@chromium.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 3:36 AM, Hallvord R. M. Steen <
> hsteen@mozilla.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I don't have "input" as such, but I have a few questions:
> >> Is there any widely used software that writes RTF data to the system
> clipboard but *not* HTML?
> >
> > I'm curious about the answer to this as well. I haven't seen any
> examples raised outside of TextEdit. While TextEdit is widely deployed, is
> it actually widely used as a rich text editor? I know I just use it as the
> occasional scratch pad. If there aren't any good examples, I don't think it
> makes sense to make RTF a mandatory data type. If there are, I still think
> it'd make more sense to push those editors towards supporting HTML rather
> than trying to make browsers support RTF.
>
> Another likely "scratch pad" editor that only supports RTF is Windows
> WordPad.
>
> A real and [surprisingly still] popular editor that only accepts RTF
> pastes -- at least as of its fairly recent X5 version (now on version X7)
> -- is WordPerfect.  I learned this in the past few years while building a
> very [*very*] premium product for a legal research/workflow solutions
> company.  When I created the rich copy functionality [using Flash], we were
> required to support plain text, HTML, and RTF for the clipboard injection
> as WordPerfect X5 couldn't consume the HTML clipboard segment when pasting
> but could consume RTF.  Not sure if that has changed in X6 or X7 as I no
> longer work for that employer.
>