On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 3:34 PM, James M. Greene <james.m.gre...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> We never really came to a decision on if RTF ("application/rtf") should be
> listed as a mandatory MIME type but the general consensus seemed to be
> leaning toward "yes":
>
> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2013OctDec/0197.html
>
There was some pushback from vendors - and I think their arguments were
reasonable. Why should a web browser have to include code to generate RTF
documents to write them to the clipboard? It's going to be a non-trivial
amount of code, it will be rarely executed and could easily come with
exploitable security vulnerabilities. It only makes sense to require this
if there is a significant amount of software out there that supports
pasting RTF data but does *NOT* support pasting HTML data - so that if we
mandate support for writing HTML to the clipboard but leave RTF out, many
users will have problems pasting text with formatting into another
application. How many applications would have this issue on the various
platforms? How widely are they used? Would users even expect to be able to
preserve formatting on pasting into or copying from these applications?
A reply from you in the earlier discussion of these questions is here:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2014JulSep/0325.html
-Hallvord, wearing an invisible clipboard spec editor hat
