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Comment by pistoriusp | Hacker News Reader

It's to enable click-to-copy (to the clipboard.)

A slightly better implementation would have been to have a JavaScript click event on every colour and then use a JavaScript to Flash function to do the copy to clipboard. Then only one Flash file would have had to be loaded.

AFAIK, it wouldn't work. Flash can only copy to the clipboard after an event like click, doubleclick, etc, within the swf.

He is saying that when you click on the color it sends a message to the flash object as to which color they are interested in and then the popup will be eligible to click on which will then copy to the clipboard.

Because Flash objects are positioned above every other element on the page, I'd have to guess which color is below the large, single Flash object. I tried doing this with variable levels of success, but concluded that having a Flash object for every color didn't have any huge downside. Performance seems to be acceptable, unless you're using IE. Let me know if you have any performance issues.

The page takes a couple of seconds to refresh on a 2007 Mac Mini.

Take a look here, this piece of code provides `copy("text");` in JavaScript, and uses only one SWF (I think). sites.google.com/site/yangshuai10/jquerycopyplugin

http://sites.google.com/site/yangshuai10/jquerycopyplugin (just linking)

I'm not going to pretend that HTML5+Javascript can easily replication Flash functionality, but I'm pretty sure it can handle copy-to-clipboard.

Edit forehead slap. The last time I had to write a script to copy to clipboard was several years ago and I was targeting the script for IE on a company intranet. I stand humbly (and foolishly) corrected.

It can't as long as I know. :(

Hm, that would be great — I'd love to see an example of this.

Typically you'll get a selection object, get the range object, and .execCommand("Copy") on it. Unfortunately it only really works in IE (afaik); it used to work in FF if you got the Allow Clipboard Access plugin, but even that's been disabled.

It could potentially be a huge security risk, which is why it's had to be sandboxed into plugins like flash.

>It could potentially be a huge security risk,

Why is copying data into the clipboard a security risk?

> which is why it's had to be sandboxed into plugins like flash.

But it's already in a sandbox (the browser). Why do we need a sandbox inside the sandbox?

I really don't understand what the huge deal is with this. It's almost harder to get some plain text onto the clipboard than it is to get the user to run a .exe.

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