Re: Clipboard

[NotZed <zucchi zedzone mmc com au>]

> Does this mean the text copy-and-paste could theoretically apply to any data
> (how would it "know" the data type?), or is text copy-and-paste just one 
> example of a "clipboard app" (which could be replaced by a more versatile 
> Gnome clipboard app)?

It already 'know's the datatype.  e.g. xterm -u8 (on recent Xfree
releases) can select/paste UTF-8 strings, and gnome-terminal can
accept them if it is in UTF-8 mode, otherwise it falls back to
STRING's - the target of a paste requests the data in a given
datatype, and if the selection owner can provide it in that datatype,
they do.  Otherwise the target can request a 'lesser' datatype, until
either it finds something its happy with, or it doesn't get anything
from the selection owner.

There are atom's for many datatypes already, and new ones can be
defined easily.

 Michael