BTW we use a similar mechanism at websktop.com (online bookmarks manager), when you copy icons:
- if pasted into our app, all bookmark properties are preserved (text/html + "data- " attribute)
- if pasted into web app like Slack, you get a nice HTML-formatted unordered list of URLs with titles (text/html)
- if pasted into text editor, you get a simple bullet-point list (text/plain)
Unfortunately handling other MIME types gets troublesome. Still, you can do a lot of cool stuff with just text/plain & text/html.