Windows Live Clipboard

March 7th, 2006

Very, very nice. Windows Live Clipboard is a script which allows you to copy structured data from one site to another. For example, you could copy your contact details from an ecommerce site to a banking site.

The standard Windows Clipboard only allows text to be copied. So you could copy an address from one website and paste it into another - the second website will then have to parse the address again.

Windows Live Clipboard is built on top of this and you copy data as XML which the second website can then understand. It seems to work well with microformats.

Surprisingly, it's just a Javascript script to add to your website and it's cross-browser compatible. Yay!

Try out the demo. Try pasting into Notepad to see the XML in the clipboard. Check out the developer's blog for background information on the project.

Of course, there's also the issue of getting websites to implement it.

Via Inside Microsoft.