Re: Yanking as HTML

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 5:43 PM, Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:

> (gui-get-selection 'CLIPBOARD 'TARGETS)
> => [TIMESTAMP TARGETS MULTIPLE SAVE_TARGETS UTF8_STRING COMPOUND_TEXT TEXT STRING]
>
> Hm...  so it lacks the "text/html" target that xclip -o -t TARGETS
> lists?

Your xclip invocation targets the PRIMARY selection (by default) while
the elisp snippet examines CLIPBOARD. This might be a reason for the
difference you observe.

In my test, text/html was present and I was able to see it as an Emacs
propertized string containing HTML tags.

Note that, in general, it is impossible to correctly copy-paste styled
HTML between documents:

* If you paste only the HTML, half the users will complain that “what
you get” in the target document differs from “what you see” of the
source document.

* If you paste both the HTML and CSS of the source, you introduce a
non-local effect (HTML is pasted at point while CSS needs to be pasted
at a different location).

* In a misguided attempt to sidestep the issue above, some programs
parse the HTML and CSS and apply CSS as direct formatting (HTML
style="" attribute). At this point, the other half of the users
(myself included) will complain that direct formatting is evil and any
tool that produces such where there was none is broken.