Clipboard/Selection Target Types

[Dom Lachowicz]

Hi David,

> AbiWord (1.0.4) didn't offer any of the above.

Yeah, AbiWord 2.0 and better supports HTML on the
clipboard.
 
> So there seems to be some disagreement for
> "text/html" 
> (i) What is the encoding?  -  have I missed
> something here, or is there
> no way of telling what encoding the data is in?

No there isn't. We should come up with a spec
regarding this. I'd personally propose, at a minimum:

HTML 4.0, UTF8 document (or document fragments) under
a text/html atom
XHTML 1.x full document, under a application/xhtml+xml
atom

> (iii) Is there a way of insisting on XHTML for those
> of us who prefer
> XML?

I'd suggest using the xhtml atom instead.
 
> Invent a new atom: "text/xml-fragment" to signify a
> fragment of XML
> source data.
> 
> The data is a fragment of XML source, stored in
> UTF-8 encoding.  

I'd suggest that any XML fragment actually be a valid
XML fragment - that is, have an <?xml version
encoding?> declaration at the top. This takes care of
all encoding issues. I'd also like to see a mandatory
DOCTYPE declaration as well.

I can see the usefulness of such a mimetype for
certain XML-ish apps. However, it says nothing about
what's inside the fragment, what it's mimetype or
doctype is, etc... I fear that this makes it virtually
useless to office-type applications who might want to
use this data, other than maybe extracting the text
from it. But that's what UTF8_STRING is for. However,
this could be of some use to something like MLView or
Conglomerate.

I'd amend your proposal to include the following:

"For any proposed xml-fragment type, the data must
also be offered under its proper mime-type atom."

> (iii) should we require an <?xml ?> header?  If we
> do, can we relax the
> UTF-8 requirement and allow normal rules about XML
> encoding?

Definitely. This shouldn't even be up for discussion,
IMO.

> Alternatively, we need to specify _exactly_ what
> should go into
> "text/html" - currently the encoding issue is a
> blocker for me.  Should
> I write up the various issues and behaviours
> somewhere?

IMO, both of these are worth doing independantly of
each other.

Best regards,
Dom

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