Re: Handling competing edits in a wiki engine?

Niels Ganser wrote:

Skippy:

The real downside I see it having to rely on JavaScript, but that's that.

The real downside - if I understand the concept correctly - ist that an open browser window isn't equal to an 'active' session. I.e. the famous lunch break still "breaks" the application as the ping is sent to the server without an user actually sitting in front of the page and editing it.

you could incoporate a check for mousemovement and keystrokes (within the browser) to mitigate this somewhat. a given period of inactivity could trigger the pinging to stop? just a random thought :-)

All those session based systems are at best suboptimal anyway. Besides the timeout-problem there are other issues to consider such as editing outside of the page (in a client based editor) an then just copy 'n' paste the changes back into the page. So I'd say the mediawiki approach as outlined by Jasper is the best possible in the context of a stateless protocol such as HTTP. Regards, Niels