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

[François Revol]

> > 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>...
> 
> What application were you pasting into?  I just
> copied some formatted text from Epiphany, then
> pasted it into both gedit and Pidgin.  In gedit,
> I just got a plain-text version; in Pidgin I got
> formatted text.

Neh, that was in IE in XP for a change, but that was on a site that had 
a form that handled the formated paste (I really wonder how though).

> I strongly suspect that your browser offers a plain
> text target.  The application you pasted into must
> have selected HTML, even though it doesn't really
> understand it.  (Some might consider this a feature
> in, e.g., a text editor, where you might be editing
> HTML source.)

It *did* understand it. It just inserted it formated, except I never 
seen that before so I thought it pasted plain text. I think the link 
didn't appear as such though.
I think it was on http://ubix.org/ but that was long ago.

The windows clipboard also has the ability to support multiple formats 
AFAIK, not distinguished by mimes, but some other enum.

> Well, you need a parser one way or another.  It seems
> more likely that an XML parser will already be loaded
> than, say, an RTF parser.  And ODF leaves you needing
> an XML parser anyway, so (X)HTML is certainly no worse.
> 
> For simple stuff, GTK+ applications could probably just
> use GMarkup without much effort.  But we'd never reach
> the uptake of HTML, so I don't think it's worth it.

Don't know enough about GTK to tell.

> > > 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.
> 
> I suppose it might, in poorly written applications.
> Applications like Gnumeric and the GIMP put massive
> amounts of stuff on the clipboard as it is.  When
> you have a lot of data, you've just got to accept
> that big stuff is on the clipboard.

No I mean inside data: urls.
The problem is not the clipboard itself but what the resulting app will 
do with it.
Usual apps have a limit on the url length, like 1024 or 4k or whatever.
So embedding a bmp this way won't work if the app puts the url in such 
a buffer :)

François.