Problem:  In later versions of Netscape and Opera, ClipMate can't determine the "Source URL" of the clip.

Reason: ClipMate has two ways of determining the Source URL.  The preferred method is to extract the "Source URL" field from the "HTML Clipboard Data" that is on the clipboard.  If that fails, then ClipMate has the ability to establish a DDE conversation with the browser, and ask it what URL it is looking at.  Unfortunately, neither of those work in recent versions of Netscape or Opera. 

Netscape has de-supported the DDE topic that used to let ClipMate query it
to ask what URL it was looking at. 
(For reference, it's the WWW_GetWindowInfo DDE topic).

It looked like good news when the "HTML Clipboard Format" datatype appeared in Netscape 7.  Unfortunately, they did not populate the Source URL portion of the data.  (In fairness, Microsoft made this part an optional part of the specification).  This makes the HTML Clipboard Format much less useful. 

If you use Netscape and/or Opera, please write to those companies and ask them to fully support the "Source URL" field in the "HTML Clipboard" data format.

UPDATE 2/28/2004 - The new FireFox update is out now, and it STILL lacks the "source url". So I've submitted this as a BUG to Bugzilla.  If you are a Bugzilla member, please vote for this one to be fix. You can see the bug here:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235986

UPDATE - they've merged with another bug, which actually IS being worked on by David Gardner:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=244685

UPDATE Nov 1, 2005:  This is going to be fixed in FireFox 1.5, due at the end of 2005.  It's currently (as of this writing) in beta, and appears to work!  You can get it from:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/beta2.html

Resources:

• Netscapes Spyglass Implementation (which they mostly ignore now)
  http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/communicator/DDE/abtdde.htm
• A useful page about DDE implementations (or botched implementations) in browsers:
  http://www.angelfire.com/biz/rhaminisys/ddeapps.html#DDEbrowser
• Microsoft's HTML Clipboard Format documentation on MSDN
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/networking/clipboard/htmlclipboard.asp

User Comments Source URLs from Netscape/Opera
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