Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's acquired CTO from Groove
Networks is on
fire these days. Demonstrating a new concept for the web called Live Clipboard. The idea behind Live Clipboard is to
maintain the structure of copied data from web to web and from web to PC. This is something you really have to visualise to understand,
well I did anyway. Ray and friend’s released this idea under the Creative Commons which will hopefully spur on
adoption by the industry; so far Dave Winter is onboard. What I
also found interesting was that all the demonstrations I’ve seen so far were done using Firefox. Isn’t it
great when we work together?
Ray Ozzie introduces Live Clipboard concept
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Hi Ben, This would not be the first time that Microsoft have used Creative Commons. They also did this for the RSS list spec they had early this year. Going by what you've said. I'm guessing you havn't watched the demo. The whole reason why its under CC is to make it easy for everyone to use. Thanks for your comments.
Posted at 4:09PM on Mar 8th 2006 by Cameron McBride
3. Wasn't aware that their RSS list spec was CC'd as well. I understand the intention is to encourage adoption of the tech as a standard. It's still an odd use of a licence that wasn't designed for software.
Have played with the demonstration using address data, and I don't see how it precludes anything I've said. What I'm saying is that Microsoft could encourage people to use this *open* standard to paste blobs of *proprietary* Office XML into web applications, and that this might only work properly for IE/Office users.
Posted at 6:13AM on Mar 9th 2006 by Ben
4. I've put together a demo: http://microtemplates.org/2006/05/14/ray-ozzie-clipboard-example/ that interoperates with the clipboard. It shows how microtemplates can be used by the website the data is pasted into to control how that data is displayed.
Posted at 1:27PM on May 15th 2006 by Steve Farrell
1. It's interesting that they've released their implementation of this under a Creative Commons licence.
Creative Commons is really intended for creative artistic works like books, music and so on. It's unusual to use it for software. But the "sharealike-attribution" version of this is not dissimilar to the GPL. Perhaps he can't use the GPL for political reasons, so that's the closest he can get.
On the face of it, this is a good idea - it's ridiculous that if I copy a table from the Web, the formatting will usually be hosed if I paste it into a word processor.
But - call me cynical - here's my conspiracy theory for how Microsoft can leverage this for lock-in. If people can seamlessly cut and paste between their desktop and the Web, what will they be cutting and pasting? It'll largely be Office data - bits of Word and Excel, primarily.
Now as I understand it this implementation serializes Live Clipboard XML data into a Javascript object. The XML data used in the demo may be harmless, but despite Microsoft's claims to embrace XML, the XML-based Office formats are a little bit... opaque to third parties. I'm not an XML expert, but I think most people who know XML would accept that they're a hideous munge that's hard for third parties to parse. By accident or design, I leave you to judge. Did I hear someone mutter "embrace and extend"?
If this is widely adopted (included in IE7, and integrated into every Web publishing system that Microsoft controls), it'll actually make the Web *less* readable in a non-IE browser. The specification for how you cram big gobs of Microsoft XML onto the Web would be open - but the XML itself will be a huge problem for third-party browsers to render and deal with correctly.
Am I being overly cynical to think that Microsoft will try to use data format lock-in as a competitive advantage?
Posted at 9:05AM on Mar 8th 2006 by Ben