Hey, I came across a great little paper yesterday, I wonder if anyone has seen it before:
A model for Semi-(a)Synchronous Collaborative Editing Sten Minor & Boris Magnusson, 1993 http://www.cs.lth.se/Research/ProgEnv/Papers/LU-CS-TR:93-109.ps They describe something very close to what we've discussed for Etoile, including representing document contents in a tree structure, and using a database server which supports fine-grained versioning of these trees. They also mention that their collaborative editing model "may be applicable for other hierarchical structures, such as file-systems, mail-tools, spreadsheets, language grammars, and application-oriented languages." :) They identify two types of collaborative editing: - synchronous, where all participants are present at the same time, everyone's changes are visible in realtime, and there is only one version of the document. (like SubEthaEdit) - asynchronous, where the collaborators work offline on private copies of the document, and later merge their changes. (like SVN) The authors argue that both types of collaborative editing are useful, and the idea system is a combination of the two, which they call semi-synchronous - and I think this is exactly what we will want to do as well. I haven't yet looked at any other publications from the authors, or their references, but it looks like there could be some valuable information here! -Eric _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
