March 7th, 2006
Ray Ozzie proposes universal Web clipboard
At O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie demoed a way to bring the clipboard concept from the PC to the world of the Web. The Web clipboard is implemented as a clipboard on the clipboard, taking the text format of the clipboard and putting in more structured data, XML schemas. He demoed prototype concepts such copying event data into a Web calendar or Outlook and taking profile information from one Web site and placing it in another. He took the concept even further–updating what is cut and pasted via dynamically linked RSS feeds.
Ozzie concluded: "The bottom line is this–I believe there is power in simplicity. The Web has emerged because it is a useful collection of hacks. Hacks get layered on hacks…if we as a community can extend the clipboard to Web we can do so. Microsoft itself can’t do it…and it will only be useful if many people do," Ozzie said. Microsoft will instrument its applications and Web services, Ozzie said, and will work with the outside world to standardize data format and other parts that would be need for a Web clipboard to be universal.
He supplies more detail in a blog post:
I call this new concept Live Clipboard…
The goal is to create a standard that works across many different scenarios, many different types of websites, and many different PC-based applications. In the same vein as Simple Sharing Extensions, we’re releasing our work under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Note: Ozzie demoed the Live Clipboard using FireFox…
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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