(In reply to comment #49)
> 
> Yes, the existing feature prevents users from editing other sections on the
> page, which sucks. That could presumably be addressed in VE: a separate
> content-editable region could be created by each section edit click, to be
> saved in bulk.


i agree with Tim's comment wholeheartedly, except the last paragraph: preventing the user from editing outside the section doesn't "suck". it's a great feature.

when editing a section, we have automatically generated edit summary with the section name. for users that use wikitext editor, you pretty much know, when you see the very common "/* section name */ optional comment" edit summary, that the edit is indeed confined to the section whose name appears in the comment.

but with VE, because of the wrong (IMHO) way bug 50872 was handled, a user can press the "sectionedit" link of some section, then edit anywhere on the page, and the summary will still show the section name of the click. this makes the summary practically useless: when looking at the history, seeing a section name in the summary tells me nothing - i don't care which button Joe pressed, i care which content was changed, and the summary does not tell me that anymore.[1]


since the most urgent issue ATM for VE is unacceptable performance on longer articles with slower machines, true section edit would be (as Tim notes) a very very desirable feature. 

how about this: i think that the cases where a section is not balanced, in terms of html tags (the case described in comment 2) is very rare. how about falling back to full article edit in those rare cases? [2]
true, it means that those cases would be even slower, but i believe that those are a negligible minority. the vast majority of the sections *are* balanced, and will gain greatly (performance wise) from the ability to edit a single section.


peace.

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[1] this can be handled by undoing the solution for bug 50872, and solving bug 51903 instead (i.e., create the summary by analyzing the diff instead of the button the user clicked), but the best thing, IMO, would be to support true "section edit" for VE.


[2] this means: get the section content from the server, and if it "does not make sense", like the example in comment #2, get and edit the whole page.