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Access control is something that Word Pro gives far greater control to than Word. In Word, you have document read and write permissions based on passwords, and then a document can be protected to only allow revisions or annotations, also based on a password. In Word Pro 96, you can specify quite precisely every role that every possible user has.
This is all based on a set of permissions lists. These are stored right there in the binary file format.
Naturally this would take some adapting if, for instance, you wanted it to work with HTML documents. Obviously you can’t just store the permissions lists right there in unencrypted ASCII text. It would require considerable server-side support, and, if you wanted to implement it to the degree that Lotus does, authoring environment support. So for instance, if I call up an access-controlled file, the server would hand my editor a file, with instructions about what I’m allowed to do and not to do. If my editor cheats and lets me do things locally, the server of course still won’t let me do those nasty things to the server copy. So it’s not trivial, to say the least.