Michael J Rees, School of Information Technology, Bond University, Qld 4229, Australia. Email: mrees@bond.edu.au.
Lightweight editing, in-page editing, user interface design, computer supported cooperative work, HTML behaviors, implementation architecture.
The earliest web browsers allowed users to edit and save a new version of any page they were reading. At the start then, the Web provided fully collaborative pages. Mosaic, the browser that popularised the Web in 1993, allowed pages to be viewed but not changed. Specialised shared pages and servers needed to be developed before fully collaborative web pages were available once more. These web page collaboration tools are now widely available but suffer from a variety of drawbacks described more fully in the body of this paper.
The lightweight in-page editing implemented as the Sparrow Project at Xerox PARC offers an excellent compromise solution to collaborative web pages. At the same time the technique can be applied to many types of page content, making it widely applicable. Unfortunately, Sparrow suffers from long round-trip server delays when operating the user interface. The work described in this paper takes some of the basic ideas for collaborative pages from Sparrow but implements them in a highly usable, responsive fashion. This is largely achieved by exploiting the DHTML document object model and client-side scripting. Examples of this new Pardalote system are presented to show the benefits of lightweight in-page editing. Some improvements to the server side page management are also described. Finally, future extensions to Pardalote are discussed, which can take lightweight in-page editing in new and more powerful directions.
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