Requirements for distributed authoring and versioning on the World Wide Web

m Current World Wide Web (WWW or Web) standards provide simple support for applications that allow remote editing of typed data. In practice, the existing capabilities of the WWW have proven inadequate to support efficient, scalable, remote editing, free of overwriting conflicts. A list of features in the form of requirements which, if implemented, would improve the efficiency of common remote editing operations, provide a locking mechanism to prevent overwrite conflicts, improve relationship management support between non-HTML data types, provide a simple attribute-value metadata facility, provide for the creation and reading of container data types, and integrate versioning into the WWW are presented in this article. unctionality which, if standardized in the context of the WWW, would allow tools for remote loading, editing and saving (publishing) of various media types on the WWW to interoperate with any compliant Web server is described here. As much as possible, this functionality is described without proposing an implementation, since there are many ways to perform the functionality within the WWW framework. It could be implemented in extensions to HTTP, in a new protocol to be layered on top of HTTP, in additional MIME types, or some combination of these and other approaches. It is also possible that a single mechanism could simultaneously satisfy several requirements. In this article we want to reflect the consensus of the WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning working group (WebDAV) on the functionality that needs to be standardized to support distributed authoring and versioning on the Web. However, this version still has some problems and questions that are being debated in the working group: