[whatwg] embedding meta data for copy/paste usages - possible use case for RDF-in-HTML?

[Hallvord R M Steen]

2009/1/20 Jamie Rumbelow <jamie at jamierumbelow.net>:
> I think that the already available solution to your problem are Microformats
> - you are essentially embedding metadata, semantically in HTML.

Of course, but I think your comment misses half of the proposed
solution.. namely what format the UA puts the information on the
clipboard in.

If you say microformats is the solution, I assume you mean UAs should
put HTML fragments with microformat-type attributes and values (mainly
class) on the clipboard as text/html, and applications that were
targetted by a paste operation should have HTML parsers and implement
support for specific microformats.
Which is why you added:

> Beside this, the applicability is rather specific - every application would
> need built in support and every website would have to markup the data in a
> specific way to support the application's format.
>
> This could get far too confusing and complicated...

It would not necessarily need support from the website - the UA could
have some logic to create associated meta data (URL, title, possibly
author from <META> tags though that wouldn't be very reliable) for the
bibliographic stuff if the page did not contain more specific meta
data for this purpose.

With Facebook I could write a Facebook application to generate the
meta data format - Facebook would not really need to support this.

With any other website I could add a User JavaScript or Greasemonkey
script that was aware of that site's markup and could extract the
information in a site-specific way and make it available to the UA as
HTML-embedded meta data..

-- 
Hallvord R. M. Steen