Copy and Paste with unAPI

At the ETech conference today, Ray Ozzie gave a talk and demonstration of "Live Clipboard", a UI for copying and pasting between web and desktop applications. It uses microformat data in the page as the data source, copies this to the clipboard, then reinterprets it when pasted.

There's been quite a bit of discussion on the GCS-PCS mailing list and code4lib IRC channel lately around the design of a specification for Dan Chudnov's brainchild unAPI, which has the same aim as Live Clipboard, essentially: making it easy to copy and paste. The difference is that instead of carrying around chunks of formatted microcontent, unAPI is based around URIs. Hence, you can copy a URI from one page, paste it into another and the receiving page can use unAPI to fetch the data corresponding to that URI.

The best way to describe it is by example, especially as the specification is still being debated, so...

  1. Visit a HubMed page like this one, right click on the ✂ icon (that's Unicode scissors, I hope everyone has the fonts to see them) and choose 'Copy Link Location' or 'Copy Shortcut'.
  2. Come back here and paste the URI into this box:

Hopefully this page will recognise the URI, fetch a list of available formats from the local unAPI service, choose an appropriate format (HTML, in this case), fetch the object and paste it into the space above.

Update: I've taken the scissors off HubMed's pages now, so just paste info:pmid/16406060 into the box above instead.

March 7, 2006

Comments

but the Live Clipboard stuff allows you to specifically pick which piece of microcontent on a page you want, the unAPI stuff doesn't appear to do that.

Also, the copy/paste of individual chunks of microcontent is just brilliant. Screw URIs! :)

"I hope everyone has the fonts to see them" - I don't. Pretty standard WinXP Home.

Posted by: Phil Wilson on March 8, 2006 3:21 PM

unAPI allows you to pick which piece of content you want to copy, as long as it has an identifier that can be used to retrieve it. It's true though, the Live Clipboard copy/paste UI is very cool. I don't think the two are entirely incompatible.

The scissors might be in Dingbats?

Posted by: alf on March 8, 2006 3:45 PM

Could be, I've definitely not got Dingbats.

Posted by: Phil Wilson on March 9, 2006 7:23 PM

I created a modified version to demonstrate the advantage of supporting URI.

http://lxming.blogspot.com/2006/03/unapi-proxy-power-of-uri-there-has.html

Posted by: lxming on March 13, 2006 1:48 PM

How to get Dingbats? (No scissors found)

Posted by: Jeffrey Barnett on March 20, 2006 10:52 AM

I've taken the scissors down now anyway - it wasn't that useful, just a quick demonstration.

Posted by: alf on March 20, 2006 10:59 AM

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