Survival of Styling with Copy and Paste

Bert Bos:
> when you copy & paste text of which a part is generated ('content'  
> property), do you get the document's text only or also the  
> generated text?
>
> Some time ago, the CSS WG also discussed another, similar question:  
> if you copy & paste an element that is subject to 'text-transform:  
> uppercase', do you get uppercase or the original text?
>
> In both questions, the answer was that that is out of scope.

I thought the answer was very simple, and twofold. If you copy (and  
paste) plain text*, no styling is retained whatsoever. If you copy  
(and paste) "rich" text, styling is preserved as far as the  
application the selection is inserted to supports the styling, so | 
text-transform| should survive most of the time, but generated  
content is not that much supported elsewhere.
Nevertheless, this is indeed out of the scope of CSS to define.

* Note the border case of plain text as used in e-mail and  
newsgroups, there 'font-weight: bold' for instance should be rendered  
as asterisks (|*|) before and after the applicable text, likewise  
generated and transformed text should be hard-coded.

	Christoph Päper

Received on Tuesday, 20 February 2007 14:14:57 UTC