[TextShare] - proposal to make a desktop-wide format for text

[François Revol]

> On Tuesday 17 June 2008, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> 
> > For this to work, we need cross-desktop agreement on a format
> > for the text.  Since most clipboard mechanisms let applications
> > give a list of available formats, this format need not be the
> > only (or even preferred) format for all applications, but it
> > should be widely supported.
> 
> IMHO a suitable candidate would be OpenDocument.
> The destination program can selectively, depending on its 
> capabilities, 
> extract any level of details, e.g. just the content, basic 
> formatting, etc.

Well, other candidates could be possible, like PDF, but it doesn't 
maintain a real logical sturcture AFAIK.

> 
> Especially if one considers not only text made of words, but also 
> situations 
> where currently a text based exchange is used for structured data, 
> e.g. 
> tables formatted as CSV, or text data is mixed with non-text data, 
> e.g. 

BeOS/Haiku spreadsheets can use text/x-csv or something I think...
But it should be easy to add others. OOo format would be a little 
harder until it's ported and a translator for it is written though.

> copying a selection in a browser, including images.

Indeed html doesn't embed images...

François.