Re: [access-control] update from the editor

>  * What happens when the XML is not well-formed and how does this
>    interact with incremental parsing.

This one is tricky for sure. IMHO we can't require that AC checks fail
if the document fails to fully parse. In my implementation I plan to
stop parsing once I hit the first start tag and if access hasn't been
granted yet at that point abort. I don't want, for security reasons, to
create any DOM nodes at all if access is denied, so it's not an option
to create a full DOM and then do access checks.

OTOH, I'm not sure if we can require that AC checks pass on a page that
can't be parsed. I'm not sure if all implementations will have a
"streaming" XML parser available so that they can check the PIs without
parsing the entire page. Though admittedly I don't know of any XML
parsers that don't support streaming.


I also thought of a pretty important use-case that requires "deny" in
the PIs. If the server sets an allow header, but you want to put a file
on that server that you *don't* want people from other servers to have
access to, you need to be able to specify that directly in the file. It
is not enough to simply not put any AC PIs in the file since then the
servers 'accept' will be used.

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 6 June 2007 23:14:45 UTC