The web development community has been talking continuously on a new initiative from Microsoft called "Live Clipboard".
For all of us who aren't a web developer I will try to be as non technical as possible.
The idea behind Live Clipboard is simply to take the concept of the PC desktop clipboard and copy it to the web.
Why the hell do we need this?
Think of your desktop applications experience. It seems natural for us that we can mark some text in IE, copy it and paste it into Word. We also expect the ability to copy a table from a Word document and paste it into Excel, getting all the data into the right cells.
But can we do the same things on the web?
Sure we can copy text from one text box to another, but how about copying a contact from gmail into our yahoo mail account?
What if I want to copy my favorite music songs list from my My Space profile to Windows media player, so it will automatically start playing it?
No. Until today we couldn't do any of those things. The initiative of Live Clipboard should make those scenarios and much more a reality.
But... In order to make Live clipboard work, we need another new buzz word to become a convention - microformats.
In a lecture I delivered numerous times I preached the crowed that we in the technology field are not inventing anything. We simply learning what the business world has done for years already.
Of course it's an exaggeration, but the point I was trying to make is that, in order to predict the future we should simply look on the past.
The "real" world has learned many years ago the importance of standards. This is why you can buy a screw and know that it will fit your new Ikea closet and also your old grandfather shelves.
This is why you can go to a store and buy a pair of Jeans size 34.
This is why we can drive everywhere around the world, knowing when to stop and when to go.
But in technology, standards are a relatively new concept. Until recently we basically had one world wide standard for exchanging information - XML. Every application developed in the last years know how to consume and publish information in the form of XML. But XML simply tells us how to read information, not how to understand it.
In order to be able to copy and paste a contact from one mail application to another, we need a well agreed format for representing a contact. What fields can we expect to see. At what order.
That is exactly the purpose of microformats. To globally decide how common pieces of data should look like. If we all agree how a play list should look like, it will be easy to copy paste it between players and web sites.
This notion of business standards (compared to technological standards) is the foundation for the next wave of web applications.
So if we all agree that microformats are the future, why we don't see it everywhere?
Well... simply put, we all want to decide on how a specific microformat will look like. Microsoft want to make a calendar item look like how they think is best. But same goes to IBM, Yahoo, Google and the rest of the big boys. And if any of you never attempted to do a large integration project, let me tell you - it's hard and takes a lot of time.
Microformats are the future, and all of us in the developers community should support and help them shape our world.
