Did not know about Writely, it was an ASP website! [0] Probably they immediately rewrote it with GWT [1] after the Google acquisition.

BTW I can't imagine the pain of writing web apps with GWT/Java, never mind something as big as Google Docs. There isn't that much in GH, but here's an example I found of what it may look like: [2].

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0: https://web.archive.org/web/20060828082805/http://www.writel...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit

2: https://github.com/GwtMaterialDesign/gwt-material/blob/maste...

I was a Writely user pre-Google Docs. Writely was great because it didn't focus on the page/paper paradigm that Google Docs stuck to for far too long ("pageless" didn't come back until 2022!)

The old-fashioned way used by standards committees to organize conversations is a mailing list.

A blog seems like a reasonable way to run a conversation too, provided that there is a project organizer to highlight comments in new posts.

Github is sometimes used this way, with the documents checked in and the conversation in the issue tracker, etc.

I remember Google Wave which we could test in our company back in 2010 or so. This should solve the chronological order collaboration problem, but also failed because no fixed topic based document could easily evolve from it.