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

[Liam R E Quin]

On Thu, 2008-06-19 at 22:21 +0200, Kevin Krammer wrote:

[...]
> I have to admit that I might have misunderstood the purpose of the thread, 
> since some other comments indicate that other people understand it as looking 
> for solutions regarding simple formatting, not HTML or word processor like 
> separation of structure and style.

I started the discussion because I want to see reliable interoperability
for copy/paste (and of course drag/drop) between applications on the
various Free desktops.

I want something better than plain text -- GMarkup is a little too
minimal -- but we can't expect every application to support all of 
ODF.  The ones that do can use ODF as a clipboard format already.

I admit I was originally planning to propose a small, extensible XML
vocabulary that would be a superset of the markup that Gtk+ and Pango
use today, and also compatible with Qt/KDE's HTML-like markup.

For example, there should be room for typographic things like bold,
italic, letterspacing, for superscript/subscript, for ruby (CJK-style
annotations) and spans marked by language and script, etc etc etc.

But I was (am) reluctant to propose something specific until others have
had a chance to comment.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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