Losing textareas; want incremental backup

[Andy Glew <glew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I love emacs-w3m! It's a joy compared to doing twiki in Internet
Explorer.


However....  I have several times lost fairly large edits, using
emacs-w3m. Leading to two separate suggestions:
   (1) about emacs-w3m's handling of textareas
   (2) about having emacs-w3m create backups for textareas
       being edited.


Explanation: I use wiki (e.g. www.twiki.org) a lot. Twiki uses a web
form with a large textarea window to edit the twiki pages. I can write
a lot of text in such textareas - as has already been reported, >>64K
bytes is not uncommon (and is, in fact, less than half a month's blog
output (I'm blogging to a single wiki page)).

The usual cycle is 
   (a) go to a wiki page, 
       e.g.  http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Sandbox/EmacsW3mBugDemo
   (b) hit the EDIT button, which takes you to a form, 
       e.g. http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/edit/Sandbox/EmacsW3mBugDemo?t=1103236776  
   (c) edit the textarea
   (d) hit PREVIEW
If you like what you see, SAVE.

If you do not like the preview, go back in your browser, and continue
editing.

On most browsers, if you go back from the preview, what you entered
into the textarea is still visible, and editable.

Unfortunately, with emacs-w3m, what you entered into the textarea is
lost when you go back. Thus, if you are not careful using emaxcs-w3m,
you can lose the results of hours of work. (I've lost circa 2 hours
work 3 times already.)

Now, I do not know exactly how the textareas are preserved. It may be
that they depend on cookie handling normally disabled in emacs-w3m;
and it may be that simply enabling the appropriate thing makes it
work.  I have not been able to get it working yet, with minor tweaks
of emacs-w3m's options.

But I do know, from long experience in the wiki community, that this
is a bug that has occurred many times with different browsers,' and
the bug is as often the browser's fault as it is due to twiki or the
use of cookies.

---

The second issue is related:

It would be very nice to have auto-save'ing enabled for the buffers
that emacs-w3m edits textareas in.

I'm afraid that I have grown used to and dependent on auto-save.  I've
not had to worry about regularly saving files manually since I started
using emacs in 1985.

I imagine that emacs-w3m would auto-save the buffers into someplace
like ~/.w3m.  

Eliminating the w3m textarea buffer is similarly unfortunate.  E.g. VC
and emacs-server leave their old buffers around, which is often a
lifesaver.