Re: PSA: HTML fragment mode interaction between Chromium, Clipboard & Notepad++

Carlos E. R. wrote:
> If you start insulting me, I stop reading. What the heck are you talking 
> about, conspiracy theories?

Hi Carlos,

In this thread we succeeded in taking a rather detailed pernicious problem
that may have been treated as mysterious without knowing the cause and we
were able to pin down its actual cause by tracing the interaction between
four different systems: Chromium, the Windows clipboard, Scintilla, and
Notepad++. 

In doing so, we demonstrated that Chromium always places a CF_HTML fragment
on the clipboard even when the user sees no formatting and that this
fragment triggers Scintilla's "HTML paste mode," which silently disables
Ctrl+A until the buffer is edited. 

We then discovered that Notepad++ does not execute macros directly from
shortcuts.xml, but instead loads them into an internal array and continues
using the last valid version unless the macro is explicitly deleted and
rebuilt. 

Once we understood that behavior, we created a macro that reliably breaks
HTML fragment mode, normalizes Unicode, removes zero-width characters,
cleans up punctuation, and returns a pure ASCII result to the clipboard. 

In short, together we reverse-engineered a subtle, multi-layered bug,
explained why Firefox doesn't trigger it, and produced a working,
reproducible fix that nobody else in the thread had the technical depth or
persistence to uncover and explain alone, least of all me.

That's the technical aspect we covered in this thread, but then there's the
emotional aspect which you seem to be reacting to, and, truth be told, I
shouldn't have reacted to the trolls by Hank Rogers & Daniel70, especially
as neither showed any understanding of the topic and yet both felt
desperate to butt into the conversation for reasons known only to them.

I apologize if you took my suggestions for you to not amplify their trolls
in a way that I didn't mean it as I feel you misunderstood what I meant,
and that's fine as tone is hard to read on Usenet  but nothing I said was
intended as an insult. 

When I referred to "conspiracy theories," I was talking specifically about
the repeated claim by the trolls who are desperate to say something,
anything! even as they don't understand any topic we've discussed, that I
am "hiding," "evading," or "changing identities to avoid people." 

I explained in detail why that claim has no basis in fact, and I've
explained the privacy reasons behind my header-naming conventions many
times over the years.

You're free to disagree with my privacy choices, but attributing motives to
me that aren't true is exactly the kind of misunderstanding I was trying to
clear up. That's all.

If you don't want to continue the TECHNICAL discussion, that's your choice. 
But, in all seriousness, I think I've solved all the difficult problems.

Since I covered the topic at the level of a published paper, there's really
not much more left to discuss, as far as I can tell. It's all fixed now.

I'm simply clarifying the record so the technical thread doesn't get
derailed by conspiracy-theory assumptions about my clear intentions.
-- 
Often those who most deprecate privacy are those who least understand it.