Copying a Selection's "inner html" vs "outer html"

[danburzo]

In current browser implementations, doing:

var sel = window.getSelection();
sel.removeAllRanges();
var r = document.createRange();
// this: 
r.selectNode(somenode);
// or this:
r.selectNodeContents(somenode);
sel.addRange(r);

has the same result, whether using selectNode or selectNodeContents, to what is copied to the clipboard:

• Firefox will put the node's "outer html" to the clipboard's text/html mimetype
• Chrome and Safari will put the node's "inner html" to the clipboard

See Chrome issue here

I think there needs to be a distinction, allowing developers to decide whether to include the entire node in the clipboard, or just its content.

[rniwa]

Please file this bug under https://github.com/w3c/selection-api/issues/ or https://github.com/w3c/clipboard-apis/issues/

[danburzo]

Thanks, @rniwa! I've logged a bug on the Clipboard APIs repo.