I have long lamented the fact that even simple things like copying and pasting addresses don’t work well in the browser. This is really symptomatic of a general issue– it’s difficult to move structured information between web applications.

Bill Burcham has a must-read post called Baby Steps to Synergistic Web Applications in which he proposes an AJAX approach to solving the “every webapp is an island” problem. He begins with the low hanging fruit of creating a “web cliboard” to facilitate information transfer across webapps

The proposed approach shifts interpretation of the cut and paste verbs to the server, and stores multiple domain specific representations of the data to be copied on the client clipboard in a simple XML format.

Just like client applications, web applications can choose the clipboard format that they best understand.

In addition to representing values, the web clipboard can include links to resources that live in the cloud, eliminating the need to copy all of the data to the client clipboard.

The part I need to understand better is to what extent if any this proposal requires browser changes– can copy and paste be intercepted in Javascript in a cross browser fashion? (I know how to do this in Internet Explorer but not in a standards compliant fashion.). In any event the changes required aren’t profound.

To push this forward we need adoption by a pair of webapps for which a web clipboard for structured data is a compelling addition. More brainstorming is needed about what these apps might be.