Having to switch between blocks (or create new ones) isn't hard, but that slight effort required breaks up the "flow" of editing a document.
I haven't seen anything quite as good as SubEthaEdit on the web yet.
For collaboration, continuous editors drive me nuts. Someone inevitably winds up typing over someone else. It's tedious in SubEtha with just two users, and gets worse with more users or with the added latency from web apps.
We're trying to impose just enough structure to eliminate collisions.
Any suggestions for ways we might soften the hit to flow?
Maybe a good compromise would be to make each line a "block". If you're the first to click a line, you get a lock on it to edit it. Make a new line (i.e. block) by hitting enter/return.
I disagree that people typing over each other is a problem with continuous editors. If you're editing different lines it's not a problem at all. If you're editing different parts of the same line SubEthaEdit can handle that fine. The only ambiguous case is when your cursors are at the exact same point when you start typing. Since SubEthaEdit shows you where each user's cursor is you can clearly see if you're about to conflict with someone else. The key to this type of collaboration is it need to be very much real-time, the lower latency the better.