What's the difference?

Yesterday I was reviewing Workbook progress with

Jason

and we started digging into the diff experience and UI.

On first glance I was excited that we were doing this. But as I got into it, and started thinking more about it, I started having second thoughts about us going down the diff path.

The way we're doing it is all-or-nothing. It's "here's everything that changed". It's not really a collaborative editing experience where someone can walk through the changes and accept or decline a specific change. In my experience writing with David, we'd never really work this way. We typically write something, review it, an edit is proposed, sometimes many, a new version is written, some is used, some is not, etc. It's more piecemeal than all-or-nothing.

I'm concerned that if we go the route we're going, we're going to end up with something that works, but isn't useful. And "works but not useful" is really the worst combination. It's sufficient to tick the box that we have a feature, but it's not adequate to actually use as desired.

Further, if writing solo, diffs aren't really useful at all. You don't write your own stuff with track changes on. You just write, and edit, and edit, and edit, and delete, and add, and work from a working document that's alive and changing. You don't review your own changes in a formal way, you just push forward.

So my suggestion would be that we eliminate diffs. We just don't go there. Workbook is a final publishing platform, it's not a collaborative editing environment. What we're solving for is easily getting a book up online, in in various formats, in the simplest, quickest, more comprehensive way. If you want comprehensive collaborative editing and change tracking, write it elsewhere and, when it's done, pop it in here to publish.

And of course people can write collaboratively here, but it's more about "here's where it stands" rather than "here's everything I changed on the last edit."

Thoughts?