While editing Wikipedia articles, I often faced a situtation when I accidently pressed "Back" in browser, then spontaneously pressing random buttons, returning the edit form and... having a blank editor or the last submitted version of an article. I've been so much frustrated every time when I ruined the new article and had to start it over again.
What can we do to fix this? I propose to keep the current textarea state in localStorage, at least one version per article (we can store them by the relevant article ID, also adding the current timestamp and to the structure). We can also let the user disable key press triggered storage update, but to save backups every N secs, or just to save them by pressing a button.
[Timestamp and possibly other info would be stored to collect garbage. As we know, localStorage has a small quota.]
There is another approach: storing the backups at the server side. Some people ( :] ) suggest that it's quite cheap and may be reasonable. Anyhow, we cannow allow per-keypress backup update due to requests latency. And this would be a disaster to process a huge bunch of some way useless requests simultaneously, unless dedicated servers are run to serve swiftly and obediently.
All this stuff can be developed as a gadget. You can make it a WikiEditor plugin. And it would be re-e-aally fantastic to make this work with VisualEditor. Who would try to make this thing look good? Or should I do this otherwise? :)
-- З павагай, Павел Селіцкас/Pavel Selitskas Wizardist @ Wikimedia projects