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

[Shaun McCance]

On Thu, 2008-06-19 at 18:16 -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> 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.

I think CML and SVG pretty clearly fall into domain-specific
formats, not just rich text.  Even DocBook is unlikely to be
useful between anything but DocBook applications.  Obviously,
applications should attempt to offer whatever formats are most
appropriate for the types of data they're producing.

The two most interesting (to me, andy) cases here are MathML
and Ruby.  They are both used to mark up text, but I wouldn't
call either of them "rich text".  In both cases, the markup
is actually part of the language (the human language).  It's
semantically significant.

Removing italics from a sentence has an insignifant impact on
the information.  Removing the overscripts and underscripts
from a summation turns it into jabberwocky.

--
Shaun