World Wide Web distributed authoring and versioning (WebDAV): an introduction

Abstract

Ⅵ Today, the typical use of the World Wide Web is to browse information in a largely read-only manner. But this was not the original idea—as early as 1990, a prototype Web editor and browser was operational on the Next platform, demonstrating how Web content could be read and written. Unfortunately, most of the world never saw this editor/brows-er, but instead developed their view of the Web from the widely distributed text-based line mode browser. When NCSA Mosaic was developed, it improved the line mode browser by adding a graph-ical user interface and inline images, but had no provision for editing. As Mosaic 2.4 reached critical mass in 1993–4, " publish/browse " became the dominant model for the Web. But the original view of the Web as a readable and writable collaborative medium was not lost. n 1995, two browser/editor products were released: NaviPress by NaviSoft and Front-Page by Vermeer. These products began developing a market for authoring tools that allow a user to edit HyperText Markup Language (HTML) pages remotely [Raggett 1997], taking advantage of the ability to work at a distance over the In-ternet. In early 1996, NaviSoft and Ver-meer were purchased by America Online and Microsoft, respectively, presaging major corporate interest in Web distributed authoring technology. In 1995–96, Netscape released Navigator Gold, a Web browser/editor tool, able to publish pages to a remote Web server. 1996–7 also saw the release of Web-integrated word processors, with Microsoft Word 97, Lotus WordPro 97, and Corel WordPerfect 7, all with HTML editing and remote publishing capacities. In this setting, an ad hoc collection of people interested in remote authoring (now known as the WebDAV working group) met at the WWW4 conference in December 1995, and then at America Online in June 1996. Comprised of developers working on remote authoring tools, and people generally interested in extending the Web for authoring, this group identified key issues in writing these authoring tools, and also found a pressing need to develop standard extensions to the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) [Fielding et al. 1997] for the following capabilities: —Metadata, to create, remove, and query information about Web pages, such as its author, creation date, etc., also to link pages of any media type to related pages. —Name space management, to copy and move Web pages, and to receive a listing of pages at a particular hierarchy level (like a directory listing in a file …