
Webstrates: Shareable Dynamic Media - clemensnk
http://www.webstrates.net
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clemensnk
Hi all, I am the first author on the Webstrates paper. I'd be happy to answer
any questions you might have about the project.

The tl;dr: Webstrates persist and synchronize changes to the DOM of any page
served from the Webstrates server to clients of the same page. Using
transclusion through iFrames we can create (a dynamic) application-document
like relationships between two pages.

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pmontra
It's very interesting. I looked at the video and I'll try to download and make
it run. I played a little with share.js time ago so I have great expectations.

I see that you support basic authentication and oauth is marked as
experimental. Authentication is not the core of your project but it's very
important if you want that people downloads and use your software for
something real, collaborating over the internet instead of playing with it
locally.

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clemensnk
Thank you for your interest!

We are aware that proper security and authentication are core problems to
solve for the idea to scale. However, it is also an open (research) question
how to do this properly.

Currently we have per-webstrate access right, which means that if you give
someone permission to write in one of your webstrates they can do anything
with it, e.g. empty its body. It could be interesting if it would be possible
to specify what operations you would permit from someone to a webstrate, e.g.
"you can only add to this particular unordered list, and the added element
must have following form".

Good ideas are welcome.

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pmontra
I think that Google got the permission system right with its Docs. The
documents I work with are almost only technical documentation or meeting
minutes on projects from customers, 95% text a few spreadsheets. I give
editing permissions to the people I work with, view permission with the people
I don't want to edit the document. It's not fine grained but I never needed
more than that since I started using Docs in 2008.

On those projects we have designers who share their designs on Frontify or
Invision. We only have the permission to view and comment. Even in this case
is not fine grained, it's on the whole page.

I think this covers the 99% of business cases and possibly more, furthermore
page wide permissions are something people is familiar with (least surprise
principle) and a degenerate case of fine grained ones.

