- From: Hallvord R M Steen <hallvors@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 01:52:19 +0900
If this was discussed already, sorry. There has been so much RDF/meta data discussion that I'm far from on top of it.. I'd like some way to add meta data to a page that could be integrated with the UA's copy/paste commands. For example, if I copy a sentence from Wikipedia and paste it in some word processor, it would be great if the word processor offered to automatically create a bibliographic entry. If I copy the name of one of my Facebook "friends" and paste it into my OS address book, it would be cool if the contact information was imported automatically. Or maybe I pasted it in my webmail's address book feature, and the same import operation happened.. If I select an E-mail in my webmail and copy it, it would be awesome if my desktop mail client would just import the full E-mail with complete headers and different parts if I just switch to the mail client app and paste. To make such use cases possible I suppose what we need is a) some way to embed standardised interchangeable meta data in HTML (so that users can copy from regular web pages) b) some support in the UA for figuring out what meta data applies to a selection and, say, place three alternative formats on the clipboard: 1) text/plain 2) text/html 3) application/metasomething+xml c) support in other applications for detecting the third format on the clipboard, parsing and using it. For example, a web application might use the HTML5 clipboard data API to detect the meta data, parse it with the UA's XML parser, and figure out if it was data it could make use of. Most applications would use *both* the regular text (plain or HTML) format and the meta data. Would anyone use this? I think that actually some of the functionality we would enable here would be so compelling that users would request it. If, for example, Wikipedia -> OpenOffice pasting created automatic bibliography entries users would start asking why Encyclopedia Britannica -> Microsoft Word did not. If Myspace.com let you copy a selected contact and paste in some webmail or OS address book, Facebook users would start several Facebook groups trying to get it "working" there. -- Hallvord R. M. Steen
Received on Monday, 19 January 2009 08:52:19 UTC