Abstract: An application is enabled to allow any one of a variety of locking behaviors including different locking behaviors for different elements of shared text. For example, whereas one string may be associated with an implicit lock (granted when the user gives that string focus), another string may have an explicit lock (granted when the user takes some particular action such as clicking on a “lock” button), while yet another string may have a deferred lock (granted only when the user attempts to update the string). A similar range of possibilities is available for string update events and for unlocking the string.