In-line editing in Drupal

Every now and then work lets us developers explore things that we think would be interesting and valuable to the company, in the same way that Google does. Today I had a look at getting inline editing working in Drupal. The Drupal 7 usability team are keen on this but it is not easy. I think I have an approach that may work, and I am working at getting it working as a drupal6 module. Although it is not quite the full page editing ability that they are looking for in Drupal 7 it will be a step in the right direction. Essentially I am going to try and use a diff based approach. So for any field that is edited we will store the previous rendering of the text, compare that to the edited text and try to apply the difference to the node. I still have a way to go, but conceptually I think this could work. When I have something that works with the headline and body content I will post a module for people to review.