Post #1823412
2026-04-28 11:03 UTC
One of the talks I liked the most at PaPoC was for this paper on CRDTs for spreadsheets: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3806077.3806695
Collaborative spreadsheet apps (Notion, Google Sheets) have offline editing support; what should happen when two replicas that have both been edited offline get merged together? It turns out that both Notion and Google Sheets have pretty weird semantics. Especially Notion. The speaker showed a lot of specific examples that everyone was amused/horrified by.
Replies (1)
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@lindsey@recurse.social 2026-04-28 11:08
The interesting questions about merge semantics for collaborative document editing have to do with what happens if users are editing in the same place. My experience in reality is that people stay well away from wherever they see others' cursors in the document -- but once offline support exists, weird stuff like this would seem to come up a lot more often (unless, of course, users develop some ad-hoc out-of-band protocol to stay out of each other's way).