
A short (and slightly biased) history of collaborative editing - raganwald
http://log.emonk.net/post/6539765532/a-short-and-slightly-biased-history-of-collaborative
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Rauchg
The statement you're trying to refute remains true. There's no application on
the Mac that has an implementation of Operational Transformations (OT) nearly
as powerful as the Google Docs / Google Wave OT.

SubEthaEdit (while incredibly impressive and producer of a big technical feat
at the time), is a _plain text_ collaborative editor.

Similarly, but higher up the scale, is Etherpad, which has the concepts of
annotations for rich text.

On Google Docs and Google Wave, I can collaborate on rich text of arbitrary
markup. For example, I can import any Word document and collaborate on it in
real time. This is not a huge challenge from just the convergence / intention
preservation algorithms perspective, but because they run on a browser. Wave
went to the extent of normalizing the HTML representation of the
`contenteditable` divs across all browsers to enable converging document
results. Google Docs ditched `contenteditable` and rewrote an editor on top of
plain HTML, with range selection logic and caret simulation built from
scratch.

The fact that software like iWork Pages / MS Word[1] don't offer similar
functionality (even with native, hand-made rendering engines and no browser
support challenges) in 2011 speaks of Google's clear superiority in the office
suite cloud offerings, which is the point the original article was trying to
make.

[1] There's a plugin for Word <http://www.codoxware.com/> that enables OT
written by one of the most well-known OT researchers, who spoke at Google in
'08 (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84zqbXUQIHc>)

~~~
ugh
Here is the sentence that immediately precedes the quoted text: _“It’s not
just that many of the applications we use are actually intimately tied to the
web (even Apple’s own products are able to make quick changes like the switch
to iCloud services in iOS 4.3 thanks to markup being used in place of native
code), it’s that the web provides something native applications cannot.”_

Topolsky seems to claim that collaborative editing with native apps is
categorically not possible. That seems like a very odd claim given the history
of collaborative editing.

Maybe he wanted to say that currently no native collaborative rich text
editors exist (which is true), but he certainly failed to express that.

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oscilloscope
There is a new OT editor called ShareJS for plain text and JSON built in Node,
by Joseph from the Google Wave team:

<https://github.com/josephg/ShareJS>

<http://sharejs.org:8000/> (examples)

JSON OT is particularly neat for developing unique interactive applications,
such as this board game:

<http://sharejs.org:8000/hex.html#9gBIACm3su>

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younata
It's amazing how much awesome tech can be traced directly back to Xerox PARC.

