Re: BIKESHED: Rename "Powerful features"?

+1 to "privileged context" as well.  I'm not convinced it's the best
possible term, but I haven't been able to think of anything better at the
moment and I do think it's at least a bit more clear and a little less
overloaded than "powerful" is.

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 6:59 PM, Alex Russell <slightlyoff@google.com>
wrote:

> I think "privileged" works well. I've worried in past that such a
> restriction would cause debates about new layout features which are
> unlikely to create new opportunities to alter the origin model and (perhaps
> this just me), but "privileged" seems to exclude features like that but
> capture features which have the ability to change the relationships between
> origins (e.g., Service Workers or hardware token access in Web Crypto).
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 3:53 PM, Crispin Cowan <crispin@microsoft.com>
> wrote:
>
>>  I’m still not entirely clear on the semantics, but my gut says that a
>> more relevant term would be “Privileged context”; the feature needs higher
>> privilege to be able to access something that enables the feature.
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Mark Watson [mailto:watsonm@netflix.com]
>> *Sent:* Wednesday, February 18, 2015 1:00 PM
>> *To:* Crispin Cowan
>> *Cc:* Mike West; public-webappsec@w3.org; Yan Zhu; Brian Smith
>>
>> *Subject:* Re: BIKESHED: Rename "Powerful features"?
>>
>>
>>
>> It's hard to argue that a feature which exposed a vast library of
>> advanced mathematical functions is not "powerful", but - correctness and
>> speed aside - such a library could equally well be built in Javascript, so
>> it's also hard to argue that it requires a secure origin. One can imagine
>> features that access the users machine in a way that requires user
>> permission but which aren't otherwise all that powerful and one can well
>> argue that such a feature - because of the desire to know to whom
>> permission is being granted - should require a secure origin.
>>
>>
>>
>> "Powerful" and "Requires a secure context" are not well aligned.
>>
>>
>>
>> Why not call the document "Secure contexts" and the features "Features
>> requiring a secure context" ?
>>
>>
>>
>> …Mark
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Crispin Cowan <crispin@microsoft.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>  How about we go to the required semantics, and then reverse-engineer a
>> name?
>>
>>
>>
>> I have not read the spec. Rather than giving excuses or whining about it
>> J I will use it as a forcing function: someone plese post no more than
>> 100 words why some “powerful” features need Foo treatment, and other
>> “!powerful” features need bar treatment. From there we hopefully can derive
>> a good name for this feature property.
>>
>>
>>
>> Why 100 words? If it takes more than that, then I submit the concept
>> isn’t baked yet.
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Mike West [mailto:mkwst@google.com]
>> *Sent:* Wednesday, February 18, 2015 8:03 AM
>> *To:* Mark Watson
>> *Cc:* public-webappsec@w3.org; Yan Zhu; Crispin Cowan; Brian Smith
>> *Subject:* Re: BIKESHED: Rename "Powerful features"?
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 4:49 PM, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com> wrote:
>>
>>  I'm sorry you feel this is a "bikeshed"
>>
>>
>>
>> That was supposed to be a joke. :) I thought your concerns were
>> reasonable, and I think it's worth bringing them back to the group
>> explicitly.
>>
>>
>>
>>  - the objective is to *avoid* future pointless nebulous discussions of
>> the kind "is X 'powerful' ?" in favor of a more concrete "does X require a
>> secure context ?". "Secure context" is a term we can own and define
>> rigorously, "powerful" is not.
>>
>>
>>
>> I think you underestimate the ability of people to argue about terms. :)
>> "Secure" is certainly something that folks can and will debate. See, for
>> instance, the long, long threads discussing opportunistic encryption. Is
>> that secure? I certainly have an opinion, and I know completely reasonable
>> folks who completely disagree with me.
>>
>>
>>
>>  You could reasonably drop the qualifier "sufficiently" on the grounds
>> that we don't generally bother writing specs for things that are
>> "insufficient" and you could name the section "Features requiring secure
>> contexts".
>>
>>
>>
>> I think at some point we need to accept that we're defining a term. If
>> it's the case that defining "sufficiently secure" is as likely to cause
>> debate as defining "powerful feature", then let's leave things as they are,
>> because "POWER" is a totally radical name for a spec.
>>
>>
>>    --
>> Mike West <mkwst@google.com>, @mikewest
>>
>>
>>
>> Google Germany GmbH, Dienerstrasse 12, 80331 München,
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>>
>> (Sorry; I'm legally required to add this exciting detail to emails. Bleh.)
>>
>>
>>
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