On 6/2/15 4:05 PM, Kelvin Poon wrote:
Hi public-webapps
We are exploring a new web API for content to be notified of clipboard
changes and would like to discuss it here.
The problem
For certain classes of web apps, it is necessary to determine when new
clipboard contents have been set, e.g. in order to fetch and display
them, to update context menus, or synchronize the content with another
application or device.
The problem is that the web standard currently provides no explicit
notifications when new content is copied from another application to
the clipboard. As a result, these web apps typically re-fetch the
clipboard every time they regain focus, and only act on the contents
if they have changed since last time (e.g. passing it to a remote
system, updating context menu, etc). This polling mechanism is
generally inefficient, especially when the clipboard contains a large
image file.
We currently have interest from Citrix and Chrome Remote Experience
teams in improving Chrome's clipboard support.
The proposal
Google propose to update the W3C Clipboard API and events
specification <http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/>with an
onClipboardChangedevent on the document object. The user agent should
only signal the event if
1. a frame re-gains focus AND
2. the clipboard has changed since it last had focus.
In addition, the user agent should not signal clipboard change events
while a frame has focus. This will relieve the web app from the
burden of filtering out notifications in response to clipboard changes
generated by the app itself.
We think this new API will avoid fetching large clipboard content
repeatedly and unnecessarily for clipboard changes.
Does the community think this API would be useful?
Hallvord, All - do you have any feedback for Kevlin?
We can go into more details and work on a detailed design together if
the community is interested.
Kelvin, if there is a resource that includes details, please let us
know. (I suppose another option is a Pull Request but it might make
sense to first wait for some feedback from the group.)
-Thanks, ArtB
