Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!well!shf
From: shf@well.UUCP (Stuart H. Ferguson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Clipboard support, and why it hasn't happened.
Message-ID: <14087@well.UUCP>
Date: 13 Oct 89 07:11:30 GMT
References: <4272@sugar.hackercorp.com> <4998@cbnewsm.ATT.COM> <125872@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Reply-To: shf@well.UUCP (Stuart H. Ferguson)
Organization: The Blue Planet
Lines: 30

+-- cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis) writes:
 [ about the ideas behind the clipboard... ]
| the vision was "... you write this thing onto the clipboard in a form
| that application X understands, and when you paste it, it appears in a 
| form that application Y understands." So if you clipped a SMUS track 
| from a music program and pasted it into a music notator it would come
| out as sheet music. 
 [ ... ]
| what is required which is "Given a FORM xxxx on the clipboard, and that
| I understand FORM yyyy, find me a conversion routine that will translate from
| one to the other." For some, like 8SVX -> ILBM it should be pretty easy 
| (the PLPLOT stuff would do it nicely) but others like ILBM->8SVX or 
| ANIM->FTXT are less easily specified. 

I think you're a little confused here, Chuck.  The clipboard was never
about translating between FORM's.  It actually makes almost no sense to
try to do this since almost by definition a given FORM-type is the 
canonical format for a piece of data of a given type.  What you missed,
I think, was the concept of the CAT CLIP, which is how the clipboard
provides for communication between programs that deal with different
types of data.  There's another posting about this that goes into more
detail so I won't repeat it all here, but the basic idea is that the
source of the data provides the same data object in as many varient
forms as makes sense, and the clients that read this data will strip
out the FORM's they understand and ignore those they don't.  If the
clipboard contains no FORM's of a type that you understand, then you
can't paste that clip.
-- 
		Stuart Ferguson		(shf@well.UUCP)
		Action by HAVOC		(ferguson@metaphor.com)