Re: State of the X clipboard, and perhaps a solution

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 19:04 +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 12:58 -0500, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> > I don't think putting the burden on the user to decide stuff about
> > formats is reasonable. My users don't even know what a format is. To
> > them a JPEG is a Picture, just like a GIF or PNG. :0
> 
> Then the only use case for content negotiation for users like this is
> when apps understand different but equivalent formats. I think that's
> comparitively rare, and BeOS style translators are probably a better
> solution anyway.

I don't think that's at all the case.  One of the most common copy and
paste operations I do is copying from my web browser and pasting in a
text editor.  The web browser advertises text/html and text/plain (and
probably a host of other things, I don't know), and the text editor can
accept text/plain.  Content negotiation works very well for "degrading"
the content gracefully with standard formats.

Seriously, for most types of data, there probably exists some standard
formats that just about any application can handle.  For textual data,
text/plain almost always works as a fallback.  It might not be the best,
but it will get the data across.  Most "rich text" apps are generally
able to handle HTML and RTF these days.

For image data, any X-based image program should be able to understand
XPM.  For audio, just about everything can handle WAV, as well as some
other base formats.

Content negotiation already works, and it generally works well when
applications take the effort to do it right.  The only problem that
needs solving is persistance of the clipboard.

--
Shaun