Under the hood, the bones of that system are there! `PATCH` is a HTTP verb for a reason.

Though making the web this big publicly editable pile of documents would create a lot of spam. You already have to filter a lot if you have a form on a website, imagine if instead of filtering structured data, you had to filter diffs.

I think maybe a good half measure is just bringing web authoring tools BACK to web browsers! Netscape Navigator had one if I remember correctly. This would just allow you to write HTML files to disk though.

Bonus point for some standard protocol where you login with HTTP Basic Auth, and POST/PUT/PATCH/DELETE HTML directly to a page. You'd need some special server that understands that, but ideally it would be open for anyone to implement. You point your browser to https://yoursite.com/my/page.html and assuming you've logged in with HTTP Basic Auth, your browser suggests creating the page, rather than rendering the responded error page.

Edit: Protocol is the wrong word, someone correct me what this is really called. HTTP based... editing? A standard API? It's now something I want to make so I'll need to figure that out haha.

Edit 2: CamperBob2 in a sibling comment mentioned wikis. Just realized I'm describing a wiki lol