Hi everyone,
in this proposal I would like to talk about the naming of the “document rights” or “required rights” feature.
For those who haven’t followed the topic so far: The background of required rights is that currently the rights of the “active content” in a page like script macros or skin extensions only depend on the last author. This makes it easy to accidentally remove or grant rights when the author or the author’s rights change. The idea of required rights is to improve this situation by explicitly specifying what rights a document has and doesn’t have. Editing would then be restricted to users with the specified right(s), and regardless of the last author, nothing in the document can have more rights than specified in the document. At least for now, the last author would still be relevant and checked, so denying rights to a user could still break content, but it would be much easier to detect. For backwards compatibility, there will also be a “legacy” state where the current behavior is maintained. Take a look at the design page for more details.
The question is now how to name these rights that you can set on a document that affect the rights that are available to scripts and other “active” content of the page. Historically, there is the “required rights” XClass that has this purpose for programming rights. I later suggested the name “document rights”.
Here are some pros/cons for both names:
Required rights
Pro:
- the terminology has already been used in the same context in the past (see, e.g., XWIKI-6297)
- the recently introduced required right analyzers are closely tied to this new concept and match in their naming
- matches well that users are required to have these rights to edit the page
- matches well that the page’s content requires these rights
- the name is sufficiently different from existing rights
Contra:
- I could imagine a future in which we remove the dependence on the last author of the document for granting in particular programming right as it seems very unnatural that, e.g., an extension depends on the rights of the user who installed the extension. In that case, it seems unnatural that “required rights” determine the rights that the page content has independent of the author.
- Doesn’t really match the fact that you “grant” these rights, i.e., by adding a “required” right you’re granting that right
Document rights
Pro:
- document rights grant rights to a document similar to existing “user” rights that grant rights to a user
Contra:
- the term can be confused with the existing rights that also apply to documents
Conclusion
Given the current reliance on the last author for many purposes I currently don’t see us moving into the direction of not using the last author anymore, despite this becoming more and more difficult, e.g., with real-time editing. Given these arguments, I think it makes sense to stick with the original term “required rights”, so here is my +1 for that.
I’m looking forward to hearing your opinions and possibly also other naming suggestions.
3 posts - 2 participants