* Ozzie’s Live Clipboard
The legendary Ray Ozzie who was responsible for what I consider one of the most overrated applications of all time, Lotus Notes, is without doubt, a terrific thinker. He recently wrote a polemic in which he talked about “wiring the Web” – making moving data between Web sites and between Web sites and PCs simple and effective – that I believe is one of the important “missing links” of the Web.
Ozzie commented that “[today] each site is still in many ways like a stand-alone application. Data inside of one site is contained within a silo. Sure, we can cut and paste text string fragments from here to there, but the excitement on the Web these days is all about “structured data” such as Contacts and Profiles, Events and Calendars, and Shopping Carts and Receipts, etc. And in most cases, the structured form of this data, which could be externalized as an XML item or a microformat, generally isn’t. It’s trapped inside the page, relegated to a pretty rendering. So where’s the clipboard of the Web?”
Answering his own question, Ozzie offers us a really clever suggestion for a Web clipboard: Live Clipboard.
Live Clipboard uses Javascript and standard XML data formats implemented in Web content to allow the capture of data on Web sites and their transfer to and from other sites and PCs.
The Live Clipboard Technical Introduction explains how the system works in detail. Briefly, an icon for Live Clipboard enabled content is inside a specially constructed
The Web page code can manipulate pasted data as required which means that transformations from PC formats to both standard and custom server-side formats can be supported.
The initial design has been “verified to work in IE 6, IE 7 Beta 2 Preview and in Mozilla Firefox for PC and Mac.” Support for other browsers is being developed. An important aspect of the design is that it “does not depend on installation of any client side applications or browser plug-ins, and it never gains access to the contents of the clipboard without explicit user action to paste.”
Of course there’s a lot more detail in the preliminary design of Live Clipboard that will require the Web community not only agreeing to use it but also getting involved by collaborating in the development of a fully fleshed out system. But even at this early stage the Live Clipboard proposal appears to be sound, very practical, and the possibilities are very exciting.
