RE: Access Control Preliminary Draft

On June 16, Dylan Barrell wrote:
>>5.2 Access Inheritance
>>
>>It must be possible to assign an access attribute to a collection
>>(such as a directory).  By default, resources contained in a collection
>>must inherit access attributes from their parent resource.
>>
>>5.2.1 Rationale
>>
>>Inheritance of security information between directories and files
>>within most file systems behave in this manner.  This promotes an
>>orthagonal implementation on the Web.
>
>I think that specifying that the access attributes must inherit from the
>parent resource will require us to specify too many details regarding the
>semantics of changing the permissions of the various resources (eg what
>happens to the children's access attributes when we change those of the
>parent). I think this should be restated as
>
>"5.2 It must be possible to assign an access attribute to a collection
>(such as a directory).  The system must assign appropriate default access
>attributes to resources added to a collection."

Hmm.  I think I like this even better than the original requirement -- I
think this provides a good tradeoff between wanting to assign individual
access permissions to resources, but still have some way for a resource to
receive its initial, default permissions.

- Jim

Received on Thursday, 19 June 1997 21:49:00 UTC