Unexpected behavior of PasteButton

Question

Assume the following very complex palette:

CreatePalette[
  PasteButton[FontColor -> RGBColor[1, 0, 0]]
];

Its purpose is to insert a FontColor rule. It works like expected in a notebook but I plan to use it inside raw cell expressions. Please try the following two examples. Paste the following code into a notebook

NotebookWrite[
 SelectedNotebook[],
 Cell[Cell["abc", "Text"]]
 ]

You get a text cell saying "abc". Now go with the cursor anywhere between the "abc" and press Ctrl+Shift+E (this is Cell->Show Expression) to see the underlying cell data. Go directly in front of the last closing bracket, make a comma and press the palette-button. You should get

Cell[BoxData[
 FormBox["abc", Text]],FontColor->RGBColor[1,0,0]]

Pressing Ctrl+Shift+E again and the text is red. Works like a charm. Now try the following cell with the same approach:

NotebookWrite[
 SelectedNotebook[],
 Cell[StyleData["StandardForm"]]
 ]

Here I get (Linux 64, Mma 8.0.4)

Cell[StyleData["StandardForm"],
  RowBox[{"FontColor", "->", RowBox[{"RGBColor", "[", 
  RowBox[{"1", ",", "0", ",", "0"}], "]"}]}]
]

which is not what I expected and which does not work.

Question: Can anyone explain me what's going on here? Is the PasteButton aware of the context?

Background: The background is, that I have created a palette which I want to use to adjust style-sheet definitions. That was, when I stumbled over this behaviour.

Fix: One possible way to fix this is to use NotebookWrite directly instead of the PasteButton. Disadvantage of this approach is, that the expression can no longer be inserted into a normal notebook, because there you have to insert cell-expression.

Answer 1

I think this is a bug in the pasting which is attempting to be smart about what to paste, since in the case of pasting into a cell you actually write the box expressions, while when you are working with the cell expression you want the input-form inserted. In any case, this seems to work in both cases:

 CreatePalette[
 Button["Font Color", 
    NotebookWrite[SelectedNotebook[], ToBoxes[FontColor -> RGBColor[1,0,0]]]
 ]]

Playing around with this I saw no problems with using it in a normal notebook. If it does cause problems with your other code please post code describing the issues.