Read-Only Live Clipboard
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
A couple of years ago I had a client who insisted that they should be able to copy some cells from Excel and paste the data into their web-based inventory system. I ended up creating a faux-grid of textboxes, with a “paste-box” where they could paste the data, which would be parsed and entered into the grid. It really felt like a horrible hack - the pasted data wasn’t always in the “correct” format, and my parsing code was pretty dodgy.
But now that microformats are poised to take over the web, it’s not looking like such a stupid idea after all! Ray Ozzie outlined his “Live Clipboard” idea a few months ago and created a pretty cool system that allows you to copy and paste microformats between web pages and applications.
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Microsoft giveth, and Microsoft taketh awayeth. Damn Microsofth. They’ve killed the super-cool, barely known, rarely used x-bitmap (XBM) image. Kind of. 
