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

[Liam R E Quin]

On Thu, 2008-06-19 at 21:59 +0200, François Revol wrote:
[...]
> It seems the most common, but not every app will want to have an html 
> or xml parser just for pasting...

Most already have an XML parser these days, e.g. for libglade, for
ODF (which is in XML), etc etc. ... even Pango uses an XML format.

> OTH, if the toolkit itself provided the abstraction...
The toolkits can do a lot of the work but not all.

HTML isn't sufficient e.g. for MathML, CML (chemistry), SVG,
DocBook, etc.  But it might be sufficient as a least common
denominator above plain text, especially if XHTML is used,
which is easier to parse.

So, e.g. a Chemical Modeller might offer CML as first choice,
XDG-Xlipboard-Markup as 2nd (which might in fact be HTML if that's
what people decide), and perhaps plain UTF-8 text as a 4th choice.

A receiving application that understands both XML and the XDG
format would then use CML, to have lossless copy/paste, but if
you pasted into a text editor you'd still get plain text.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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