Reading <http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html> inspired me to think about integrating `htmlize' with the primary selections XEmacs exports to other applications. Jamie says: But when pasting [the primary selection] into a word processor, you'd want to keep the font information: if both applications spoke HTML, they could use that as the intermediate format by which they transferred the data. Jamie, have you seen `htmlize'? It's at http://fly.srk.fer.hr/~hniksic/emacs/htmlize.el, and it allows easy conversion of buffer contents to HTML. Sort of like `ps-print-buffer-with-faces', but with HTML output. What I'd like to do is have XEmacs call htmlize code when exporting primary selection to applications that can handle HTML. Your article implies that the XEmacs selection mechanism is powerful enough to negotiate content types with the recipients. The content negotiation mechansim is very powerful, and I wish more applications would take advantage of it. For examples of how to use it, see the files select.el and/or x-select.el from any XEmacs distribution. There are some utility functions in there that will let you experiment with content negotiation with other apps, see what types the apps are capable of converting to, etc. For example: (x-get-selection-internal 'PRIMARY 'TARGETS) ==> [TARGETS TIMESTAMP TEXT STRING LENGTH FILE_NAME OWNER_OS HOST_NAME USER CLASS NAME CLIENT_WINDOW PROCESS COMPOUND_TEXT] (x-get-selection-internal 'PRIMARY 'FILE_NAME) ==> "http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html" On my XEmacs 21.4.13, `x-get-selection-internal' doesn't exist and `get-selection-internal' seems to always returns nil, regardless of the application that owns the primary selection. Looking at select.el doesn't provide many clue how to export HTML. It does deal with selection "types", but I don't see anything resembling a MIME-like content-type that I could check for html. select-x.c is similarly unhelpful. The only place in XEmacs that handles MIME-like content types is the (broken) drag-n-drop code.