rootninja

http://daringfireball.net/2010/05/tynt_copy_paste_jerks

John Gruber must get a lot more hits than me, because he’s really fired up about copy & paste hijacking.

When you copy some text and paste it somewhere else, do you expect to see the exact text you’ve copied? 5-10 years ago, you would say uh, yes. But today, the answer is a maybe at best.

You probably won’t be the least bit surprised when you get text formatting, a specific font, color, and maybe even a break line or graphic stuffed into your clipboard. This is very annoying in email when you’re typing in one font and pow, you paste something and the line spacing, color, font, size, and everything else gets garbled.

The latest trend in… well whatever you call this line of shenanigans, is copy & paste hijacking. Not only is a bunch of meta forced upon you, but now you have to deal with automatic link attribution?

Seriously… WTF? Enough is enough.

The first thing I do when I’m copying any text from a “fancy” site is copy it to a location where all that crap is dropped like the dead weight it is. The URL bar is a good start.

Copy the dirty clipboard to the run window or URL bar in a browser.

Ahhhh… plain text. (Soon to be a curse word, punishable by credit fine no doubt).

Now that you’ve got the text you were looking for, copy it and go on about your business.

Another place to copy the infested clipboard to is the run command, notepad, vi, or another area such as these where you know extra crap that’s tagging along for the ride like a bad virus will be unwelcome.

I’m all for giving credit where credit’s due, but forcing your hand is not the right way.