14218 - [Dogfood] Copy/paste HTML from 4.x is broken

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Editor, defect, P3)

Description

[Phil Peterson]

I used to be able to copy text from the editor in 4.x, and paste it into
Seamonkey, and have all the HTML preserved. Now, I get only a plain text
representation, with links removed, and bulleted lists turned into a run of
spaces

Comment 1

[Akkana Peck]

I'll look at it whenever I get a usable Windows build (today's is crashing on
startup).  This can't be tested on Linux because we haven't been able to find
any Linux apps which paste html.

Phil, since you obviously have a working NT build, could you do me a favor?  In
editor/base/nsHTMLEditor.cpp around line 3167, there's an ifdef DEBUG_akkana to
print the flavor the transferable wants to give us.  Could you switch the ifdef
so you'll see the printf (or just break in the debugger there) and tell me what
the flavor string is?  This would at least pin down whether it's a clipboard
problem or an editor or doc encoder problem.

Comment 2

[Phil Peterson]

The flavor is text/plain

Comment 3

[Akkana Peck]

Shouldn't it be text/html?  Pinkerton, could whoever owns the windows clipboard
now look into this?  I haven't had a good success rate with getting working
Windows builds.

Comment 4

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

accepting

Comment 5

[Peter Trudelle]

mass-moving all m12 bugs to m13

Comment 6

[bijals (gone)]

Product marketing would like the ability to cut/paste HTML from within Seamonkey
components as a dogfood feature (i.e. Mail and Composer).  Would like to bring
this to PDT's attention.

Comment 7

[Phil Peterson]

Bijal, this bug is between 4.x and Seamonkey. If there's a particular case of
copy/paste *within* Seamonkey which doesn't work, you should probably file a
separate bug. Personally, I see HTML copy/paste as being hit-or-miss right now.

Comment 8

[leger]

Unless this is needed for the marketing demo, interaction here between 4.x
and5.0 is not dogfood.  Putting on PDT- radar

Comment 9

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

my guess is that this is related to 17599. it surprises me that all this used to
work but now it doesn't. Hrm. Well, i'll investigate.

Comment 10

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

Removing "regression" from summary since both rod and I are pretty sure that this
never worked and never could have.

Comment 11

[rods (gone)]

Yes, I will go on record say this NEVER worked.  From my intimate understand of
our copy/paste code and having a general understand of 4.x copy/paste
code... This just never worked.

Comment 12

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

After talking to Rod and Kathy, it appears that the format that 4.x uses for
passing around HTML is a binary data structure. We do not want to attempt to
duplicate that.

The editor team explicitly does not want to handle backwards compatibility,
especially since you can't even copy from 4.X _Navigator_ to 4.x composer and
have it retain the html!

Marking WONTFIX, as advised by Kathy.

Comment 13

[sujay]

verified in 1/13 build.

Comment 14

[Akkana Peck]

This doesn't means that we won't support copy/paste between mozilla and other
external apps that support html on Mac and Windows, right?  Just that the 4.x
binary format is incompatible with these and so that's what we're not
supporting?

I see html copy still works within our app, so that's not at issue.

Comment 15

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

Right.