Campaign with web browser makers to improve paste support

[Chris Graham]

I've created some issues about improving your paste dialogs, but ultimately , it would be better if browsers would implement a permission dialogue...

​https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11335 ​https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1012662 ​https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1013165

I note Frederico existing involvement in the webkit issue.

Maybe you guys should try and get the community to petition on getting those bugs fixed, shed some light on it. Right now the issues probably lack momentum as users don't know the specific underlying issues, and web developers don't typically touch this stuff - so it's just between a few WYSIWYG makers, and a few browser makers.

Maybe we could also get CMS developers using CKEditor (like me) to blog about getting these issues fixed, on a certain date.

[Frederico Caldeira Knabben]

There is a lot of interest around this topic from the big players. In fact, Google and others suffer with this as well, because they also need access to the Clipboard (e.g. Google Docs).

A lot of work has been done on this field and the HTML5 specs for clipboard are pretty advanced: ​http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/

Ofc, browsers still need to have it in place so it may take some time to reach the ecstasy point. For now, you may track the status of things and push browsers to have the specs implemented through issues on their side. They're interested on this.

From our side, we hope to put more energy on this topic soon, once we'll be working on the whole clipboard thing for CKEditor 5. At that point we'll define what actions to take on browser vendors, if necessary.

Feel free to expose the results on a public document. We'll be happy to follow it for future reference. Thanks!

[Chris Graham]

Thank you for explaining this :).

[Piotrek Koszuliński]

Two more details:

1. Currently, only IE is now missing the ​http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/, which is a big problem for us. I recently twitted this: ​https://twitter.com/reinmarpl/status/558363011485011968 and I'm pretty sure that IE team knows about it.
2. There were discussions on W3C lists last year about introducing a way to trigger paste/copy operations from code. There were of course many concerns about security issues, which we understand of course. Personally I think that this API isn't so necessary on desktops, where users are already used to use keyboard shortcuts which we can handle. But there's a remaining problem with mobile environments where browsers display their own popup menus which we don't like. And if we gain control over them we will also need control over the clipboard, because we will need to replace their functionalities.

[Chris Graham]

Thanks.

I feel strongly about automatic trigger. Very many times I have seen end-users get confused with the buttons. I've put through a separate report which was accepted regarding improving the wording; that will help a lot. Ultimately though, users just want things to work, and I think in 2015 it is embarrassing that there's hoop-jumping in this basic area. Browsers are already doing explicit permission invitations for popups and for desktop notifications and for browser plugins, so doing so for clipboard is just another step IMO.