Useful (?) information on the clipboard, selection, copy and paste, drag and drop

[Thorsten Haude]

Hi,

* Thorsten Haude wrote (2008-01-03 14:12):
>* Randy Kramer wrote (2007-11-30 11:56):
>>A remaining somewhat odd thing about X selections is that exiting the app you 
>>did a cut/copy from removes the cut/copied data from the clipboard, since the 
>>selection protocol is asynchronous and requires the source app to provide the 
>>data at paste time. The solution here would be a standardized protocol for a 
>>"clipboard daemon" so that apps could hand off their data to a daemon when 
>>they exit. Or alternatively, you can run an application such as xclipboard 
>>which constantly "harvests" clipboard selections.
>
>This would not be a "solution", as it would almost certainly remove
>functionality. Call it an alternative, if you want.
>
>[my explanation]

If I had read the whole text, I would have found out that this is
covered in the document:

>The problem of clipboard "volatility" is a little worse than is
>described above. The reasoning behind the asynchronous transfer
>protocol used by X cut-and-paste is that the source and destination
>apps will want to negotiate the "best" format that both sides can
>handle. The 1980s Macintosh model (IIRC) was that there was a single
>preferred format for each clipboard datatype that all applications
>that handled that datatype were expected to support. This enabled
>putting just one representation on the non-volatile clipboard. This
>is arguably the right thing for X to do also. It seems likely that
>UTF-8 is the preferred text format, PNG the preferred format for
>bitmap graphics, TTF for fonts. Other cases are harder to decide.
>Someone needs to standardize them :-).


Thorsten
-- 
We are in the midst of an age of plenty, where the powerful try to engineer
false scarcity to protect their roles as useless middlemen.
    - Glass of Water
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