Neil spent some time yesterday hacking with the Hackpad guys ( https://hackpad.com/ -- an Etherpad fork) experimenting with embedding the collaborative editor via an <iframe> into MediaWiki's edit page in order to use it to do multiuser editing.
Apparently it's pretty cool so far and I'm looking forward to seeing it stabilized! -- but more forward-looking we're tossing the idea around the office of having a common protocol for such editor embedding, which we can then use for other things:
* the contentEditable mode for WikiEditor * the Ace syntax-highlighter in CodeEditor gadget * experimental rich text editors etc
Some of Neil & my initial notes:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future/Hackpad/Spec
The API between the host window and the (potentially offsite) iframe would need to handle loading initial text, saving it, and some state checks at a minimum; depending on how much we want to integrate the WikiEditor's toolbar portion as a standard we may need to be able to let the toolbar control things like selection and text insertion, or each editor variant could manage its own toolbar and that could be a WikiEditor-specific protocol part.
Thoughts?
-- brion