PERSISTENT VIEWPORTS

A persistent viewports architecture that provides a persistent and correctly-positioned viewport to a user when a collaboration document is being updated. The architecture identifies and utilizes a user's element-of-interest in content of the document to determine and recalculate the correct position of the user viewport. The architecture tracks a topmost element of the content (or section of content) from the viewport and employs the topmost element as a reference element. The topmost element can be one or more of a paragraph, a header, string of text, and an image. When the underlying document is to be updated, the viewport performs a lookup of reference element, and after finding the reference element, adjusts the X and Y offsets of the viewport so that the element-of-interest is inside the viewport.