[ODFPlugtest] Clipboard/Drag-Drop Exchange Formats

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

ODF does not cover anything so high up into application behavior at this time (with some notable exceptions, such as DDE, OLE support, and XLink behaviors).

There was a proposal to address this kind of inter-application communication at the ISO JTC1 SC34 level.  I don't know where that went.  The idea was to come up with a specification that would work across document-processing applications regardless of their preferred formats (e.g., ODF, OOXML, DocBook, ePub authoring, DITA, whatever).

The ODF TC has an Advanced Collaboration Subcommittee working at the moment that *might* take this up, although change-tracking is the main preoccupation at the moment.

I recall that Rob Weir has spoken in favor of such an arrangement on several occasions.  

So it could be taken up for ODF and perhaps in ODF 1.3 which is the current line of development.  

Proposals, analysis, and so on would be welcome.  Also any experience in implementations at exchanging fragments via mechanisms such as copy-paste between apps, using clipboard mechanisms, etc., would be important to inform agreement on a specification.

Conducting Plugfest experiments to see what is possible already and where the breakdowns are might be useful.  Presently, that would be more about the apps than ODF at present, but it could calibrate the situation and isolate where an agreement and standardization would be most fruitful.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: plugtest-bounces at opendocsociety.org [mailto:plugtest-bounces at opendocsociety.org] On Behalf Of joe pally
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2011 11:40
To: ODF Plugfest mailinglist
Subject: Re: [ODFPlugtest] Clipboard/Drag-Drop Exchange Formats


Hi All:

Does ODF cover (or could cover) clipboard and drag-drop exchange formats? 

Though most data interchange occurs between apps through data files, it is increasingly common to have  to interchange data through copy/paste and drag-drop among composition/viewer applications and fat-client/web-client combinations. For examples, copy and paste of areas of spreadsheets in some versions of Excel gives the formula as part of the exchange information, and in some versions it avoids the formula (in text mode copy). Given that most web browsers are unable to recieve full information from binary paste, it would be of service to the users to have more intelligent formula data in the exchanged information. 

Since exchange of partial data (not always the entire data file) is significant among applications, maybe we need to look at what we could do standardize the clipboard/drag-drop exchange data also. 

Best Regards,
Joseph Pally
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