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Comment by shabble | Hacker News Reader

maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but having looked at these capabilities occasionally, they seem pretty weak.

- There's no equivalent of "git blame" that I can find to see who/when a particular line/paragraph/section changed.

- I can't see if there's a way to view my changes separate from other edits to the document, or isolate changes by single authors generally.

- "diffing" via the "compare documents" action seems to want to generate a new document with track-changes edits for changes from old/new, but mangles the histories to present all changes as by the invoker of the diff, at that time, which isn't all that useful.

It's definitely better than nothing at all, but a long way short of where I'd hoped we'd be regarding collaborative document authoring at this point.

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I’m think your expectations are a bit unrealistic, in terms of complexity for an average office worker.

First of all, most developers can’t use git blame

Secondly, there hasn’t really been a good diffing / compare documents experience for complex documents, with images and tables. The experience we have with HTML occasionally breaks the document itself, it’s not suitable for an average office worker.

You have to keep in mind that the tools being complicated are a not just a training problem - every time I see a developer making a blog, they spend more time on the technology than on the content they want to write. That’s why I don’t host my blog, I need the tool to get out of the way so that I can think about the relevant issue - communication.

I think you underestimate most developers.

I don't think some sort of vaguely granular "last edited by XXX at YYY" annotations/tooltips/whatever would be too outrageous a feature to confuse everyone.

If necessary, could treat tables or other complicated compound entries as a single editable item, although given the mysterious passion everyone I've ever worked with seems to have for putting just about everything into a table regardless of need, I'd hope it could be granular to a cell-level, at least.

Trying to collaboratively write complicated documents with a bunch of inter-relations between sections, from different people (in my case, documentation & regulatory paperwork for medical devices) is a massive pain, and I feel like it's too obvious a problem to be confined to my particular niche.

I vaguely recall Word is widely used for preparing huge legal documents, where the content and stakes are probably similar, so maybe there are some solutions, unless they're just "throw interns at it".

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