Re: Publishing a new WD of Clipboard API and events spec

>> I think so, yes - though I may not have Anolis set up on any computer
>> I'm carrying right now, so only if somebody else can run Anolis for
>> me.. (I'm back home in one month or so, so I could presumably get the
>> draft pubready all by myself then. I guess I could also add the
>> cross-references manually for such a small spec..).

> Are you sure it's an Anolis spec? :)

Well, for whatever reason I've ended up using both ReSpec and Anolis, the latter eventually only to add some cross-references which I haven't figured out if/how ReSpec can do. 
So yes, it is an "Anolis spec" but only sort of :-p

>> I'll look at this a bit, but I don't think the differences between a
>> v.1 and v.2 would make much sense from an editing point of view. I'd
>> be more inclined to call the spec "feature complete" at some point

> I've been wondering if there isn't something we could do here to speed 
> things up a bit for the common case.
>
> The general-purpose API definitely remains useful, but by far the 
> majority use case is to just copy something, usually just text. There 
> are still lots of sites out there that use Flash for the sole purpose of 
> putting some plain text in the clipboard.

And we have the handy document.execCommand('copy') for that - browsers already generally support it though they disagree somewhat on how to enable it (potentially also whether it works without contentEditable - haven't researched this enough). The spec now says it should just work (tm) from semi-trusted events (i.e. click and friends, the types of events that are also allowed to do other semi-nuisance or semi-risky stuff like open popup windows or go fullscreen).

> I was therefore wondering if we couldn't just add a copy() method to the 
> Selection object (or maybe Range), define it as doing whatever the 
> browser does when the copy operation is invokee with that given 
> selection, and ship.

I'm not sure if adding more features to a spec that seems nearly feature complete will speed things up, generally ;-) And it should be faster to align something that's half-implemented already with the spec than to implement something new and different, so stuff that's considered mature and just waiting for implementors to catch up (i.e. nearly all of it) won't move faster if we come up with new stuff.

Although I guess I could try to be very restrained and see if there is stuff to remove from the spec. Speaking of that, it would be a good idea to throw the concept of "semi-trusted events" over to DOM Events.
-Hallvord

Received on Friday, 28 February 2014 13:00:16 UTC