On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 7:27 PM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
On the second edit conflict, I read the message at the page top. It says:
Someone else has changed this page since you started editing it. The upper text area contains the page text as it currently exists. **Your changes are shown in the lower text area.** You will have to merge your changes into the existing text. Only the text in the upper text area will be saved when you press "Save page".
Emphasis added by me. We all know that people fail to read though. If we can come up with a more colorful error message or a more intuitive edit conflict page layout, I'm all ears.
Perhaps we could look at desktop 3-way diff utilities for inspiration? Something like (pray forgive the ASCII art...)
EDIT CONFLICT
YOUR VERSION OTHER VERSION +-------------+ +-------------+ | (read only | | (read only | | text area) | | text area) | | (background | | (background | | greenish) | | yellowish) | +-------------+ +-------------+
Please merge the two versions into the text area below. +------------------------------+ | (editable text area) | | (background white) | | (prefilled with the best | | 3-way merge we can manage) | +------------------------------+
I have to say I don't understand why the system does such a terrible job -- 3-way merge is a Solved Problem over in the land of version control systems for programmers.
zw