On Thu, 18 Nov 1999, Stefan Rieken wrote:

> And about that hung connections: when you decide to edit a site, receive
> it, and then for instance you say "Nahh" or Netscape crashes, and you
> return later on, it says: "somebody is editing this site!". So it keeps
> open the old connection while I already have closed the window of it...

[Cc to pws list since this may be of general interest]

In HTTP protocol, a connection persists only while loading that page, not
as long as you're viewing. In fact, a web server has no way to determine
when the user decides to leave a viewed page. This can only be
accomplished if the user's browser tells the server so. 

There is a "cancel" feature in the GSUG swiki using this technique. If the
user editing a page presses the cancel button, the page is still sent to
the server but marked as canceled. This requires JavaScript on the client
side. This should also work when the browser window is closed or the page
is left, but the different JavaScript implementations seem to not agree on
this point.

Anyway, everyone's invited to test at http://swiki.gsug.org/GSUG.83 which
is an almost empty testing page. The Swiki is all German, so here are some
translations: 
  "Diese Seite bearbeiten" -- "Edit this page"
  "Abschicken"             -- "Submit"
  "Abbrechen"              -- "Cancel"
  "Diese Seite wurde zum Bearbeiten ge–ffnet!"
      -- "This page was opened for editing" 

Comments are welcome.

  -Bert-