- From: Hallvord R M Steen <hallvors@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:53:36 +0100
>> Of course, but I think your comment misses half of the proposed >> solution.. namely what format the UA puts the information on the >> clipboard in. > > Determining how one application passes information via the clipboard to > another application seems very much out of scope of HTML. If we keep considering clipboard support "out of scope" it means web applications will continue to SUCK at copy/paste support. Copy&paste / drag&drop is a UI workhorse the Web and its applications generally can't take much advantage of now. We should do something about that (where "we" is not necessarily the WHATWG/HTML5 WG, it might also and possibly more likely be a WebApps WG task - I don't care where it's done as long as it is done.). > If there was such > a method available, then we could investigate how to obtain the relevant > semantics from the document. But we can't do that until there is some > clipboard format available for this purpose that other applications can > understand. > > I doubt that it would be possible to create some generic format that would > be suitable for such a wide range of use cases. That, of course, is what the RDF people claim to be doing. Whether it makes sense and would get used I have no idea, but implementing some rudimentary support for putting some RDF-markup on the clipboard and retrieving it would let the Web have a go at figuring out if it IS usable for information exchange, and shouldn't take too much work if the generic clipboard API is in place. That's why I like this idea - from my naturally browser-vendor-centric perspective :-) > For an address book > application, the most sensible approach would be to add a vCard format > (text/directory;profile=vcard) to the clipboard. I assume you'll answer the "where should the UA find the structured information in order to place it on the clipboard" question with "vCard microformat". -- Hallvord R. M. Steen
Received on Friday, 30 January 2009 07:53:36 UTC