Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence (RLAI)
	open pages 2 specification

The ambition of this web page is to lay out a spec for open pages 2.0 (before in-browser editing). Extensions are encouraged.  Good ideas and reality will lead to Rich making changes to the spec.

a goal of open pages 2 (besides cleaning up the implementation) is to give page creators a greater sense of ownership, control, and privacy.  thus we introduce page owners and authors.

each page has:

• a single owner, who sets all policies for the page
• a list of authors, people who have actually edited the page
• a set of potential authors
• a list of subscribers

owners and authors are listed at the top of each page

all owners, authors, and subscribers must be registered participants. becoming a participant is very easy. when you try to do something that requires you to be registered, you are asked to provide:

• full public name as used in publications. e.g., Richard S. Sutton
• an email address 
• an optional home page url
• a simple password (could be blank)

participation in openpages 2 is typically not anonymous. the public name is used at the top of each page in identifying owners and authors, in subscriber listings, and in comments. when a participant has provided a url, then everywhere her name appears it is a subtle (not underlined) link to the url.

priviledges: the owner sets policy for

• who can become authors: registered participants, subscribers, or an explicit list
• who can view the page: anybody, subscribers, authors, or an explicit list
• who can view the subscribers: participants, subscribers, authors, or an explicit list

by default all of these are set to the least restrictive class

the owner can reassign ownership to another registered person

the following links should appear on each page (at the bottom i guess):

• subscribe
• prompts you to login or register if needed
• otherwise it is silent
• appears as 'unsubscribe' if you are already registered
• edit
• if you don't have the right priviledges, tells you what you need to do to get them
• goes into composer or seamonkey
• versions
• these are listed by date and author
• anybody can view previous versions
• only owners and authors can revert to previous versions
• reverting actually makes a new version; the old ones are not changed
• versions are forever
• a comment does not produce a new version
• upload file
• could be an image or pdf
• browses to the file
• displays message regarding appropriate uses
• suggests the first part of an appropriate location (file name) for the upload
• subscribers
• if priviledged, lists public names and statistics for the page
• if not, then stats only, plus message about why names not shown
• info
• links to an explanation of what an open page is, with sublinks:
• help, style, how-to, terms of use, suggestion box, etc
• add comment
• comments are what used to be called extensions
  
• these appear at the end of the page, separated by horizontal lines
  
• you must be a registered participant to comment
  
• owners and authors can delete comments but not change them
  
• notifications are discontinued. 
  

simultaneous editing of the same page with loss of content must be prevented either as we have in the past or in the way google groups does it (apparently by checking in some way that the editing session is still open).

Here are my (Mark Lee's) comments:

-Instead of simply giving new user's a text field to enter a url of their home page, they should be encouraged to create an openpage for their home page. There should even be a default url for their open-home-page. An external url to a homepage should be a secondary option.

-Anonymous users should be allowed to add comments, edit pages, and view subscribers if the page owner allows this. I think think allowing people to contribute w/o having to register or do anything special is a big encouragment to participate that we don't want to lose.

-Subscribe link: result of clicking should NEVER be silent. Users should always be informed of what happened. A small message saying that they were successfully described is sufficient.

-Versions: What happens if the owner restricts who can view an existing page? Should that apply to old versions as well? Or should security settings be versioned as well? I think versioning security settings would probably just be a mess and too complicated.

-Subscribers link: the name doesn't really indicate that it will also show  statistics for the page. Something like.... "About this page"?

-In-browser editor: I think it is a good first step to not worry about getting an in-browser editor working, as it is a separable problem. However, I think an in-browser editor is crucial to openpages 2.0, and I think it is the largest improvement we are making over openpages 1.