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

[François Revol]

> > Well, other candidates could be possible, like PDF, but it doesn't 
> > maintain a real logical sturcture AFAIK.
> 
> In my experience, pasting formatted text seems to
> work reasonably well.  Granted, I don't do a lot
> of word processing, so my experience is generally
> limited to copying from a web browser into an IM
> window.

I already had issues copying text from a browser window to a text form 
in another window... it embedded links without showing, so I ended up 
posting <a href="foo"><a href="bar>...

> I very much doubt either application implements
> OpenDocument, and I doubt the developers are keen
> on doing that.  I have to assume it's HTML, which
> seems to me like the most obvious cross-application
> rich text format.

It seems the most common, but not every app will want to have an html 
or xml parser just for pasting...

OTH, if the toolkit itself provided the abstraction...

> > > 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.
> 
> Obviously, applications should attempt to support
> the richest possible formats that are relevant to
> them.  Copying and pasting between two spreadsheets
> or two word processors will be nicer if both support
> ODF.
> 
> But, I think, every application that does rich text
> should be able to publish and receive HTML on the
> clipboard.  It's the path of least resistance for
> a least-common-denominator format.
> 
> (Does everybody on this thread know how X clipboard
> content negotiation works?  Talking about solutions
> without knowing the platform is like spitting in the
> wind.)
> 

No idea.

> > > copying a selection in a browser, including images.
> > 
> > Indeed html doesn't embed images...
> 
> I think the URL is probably sufficient for most
> applications.  Otherwise, HTML can embed images
> using the data: URI scheme:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data:_URI_scheme

Ah yes, that one, but it shouldn't be used for big stuff, it might 
overflow buffers.

François.