Frederik Ramm wrote: > Is the fact that Potlatch does live editing a design decision, or are > there technical reasons behind it (i.e. it would be much more > difficult to have a Flash editor with a "save" button)?
It's a design decision. If you do "buffered editing", you have to a) do conflict management, b) visualise unsaved changes on a map that stretches everywhere. Both are very serious UI challenges and complications for what's meant to be the newbie-friendly editor. People occasionally make comparisons with text-based wikis like Wikipedia, but it's not really helpful, because they're much more modal: when you've edited a Wikipedia page, you either save or abort. You can't just leave it unsaved as you continue browsing. So if you translate that model to OSM, where the atoms are much smaller, you end up presenting a "Save/Cancel" dialogue box on every deselect, which is a UI disaster. For this reason, the issue would be largely solved - as David suggests - by requiring those who aren't sure what they're doing to actively choose between "Edit" and "Play". The sole reason this hasn't been done yet is really that lots of people want lots of features in Potlatch and those which are mentioned most on the mailing lists/users' diaries/forum tend to get done first. This doesn't come up much, so it hasn't been. It will be. In fact I'm kinda tempted just to do it this evening because it's probably a whole lot easier, and less typing, than a protracted mailing list debate. (The issue would be _completely_ solved by doing this _and_ making Potlatch easier to use in general, i.e. pop-up help, fewer obscure keypresses, etc. It's an ongoing thing.) If you want buffered editing, use JOSM. And at that point I could get onto the subject of "are we - in particular, the wiki - encouraging people to run [use JOSM] before they can walk [use Potlatch]", but that's a whole nuther kettle of fish. ;) cheers Richard _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
