WEBDAV WG recommends Distributed Authoring Protocol for Proposed Standard

The WEBDAV Working Group hereby recommends the document, "Extensions for 
Distributed Authoring on the World Wide Web -- WEBDAV", in its 
authoritative form at:

ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-webdav-protocol-08.txt

for approval by the IESG as a Proposed Standard.

The document's abstract reads:

   This document specifies a set of methods, headers, and content-types
   ancillary to HTTP/1.1 for the management of resource properties,
   creation and management of resource collections, namespace
   manipulation, and resource locking (collision avoidance).

The WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol specification represents the 
rough consensus of the working group, and is the end product of significant 
technical review comprising over 1,000 mailing list messages, 10 meetings, 
and two 3+ week long working group last call periods. At least 10 working 
group members have performed a complete, detailed review of the 
specification. Thus, based on this review process, we feel the 
specification is clear, has significant technical merit, and is the result 
of an open and fair process.

At present there are at least 5 prototype WebDAV server implementations, 
and at least 5 prototype WebDAV client implementations.  Initial 
interoperability results from using the "WebDAV Explorer" client against 3 
of the prototype servers has been very encouraging, with results showing a 
high degree of interoperability after a relatively minor integration effort 
(e.g., non-architectural bug-fixes on both sides). From these initial 
results we gain confidence the specification is a firm basis for 
interoperability, and should be advanced to Proposed Recommendation so 
further interoperability testing can commence.

This specification does contain one normative reference which is still at 
Internet-Draft status, the document, "UUIDs and GUIDs", 
<draft-leach-uuids-guids-01>, which is used for lock tokens.  This document 
will be completing its last call on April 13, and we hope the IESG will 
advance this document to Proposed Standard prior to considering the WebDAV 
Distributed Authoring Protocol.  The UUIDs/GUIDs document has been reviewed 
by several members of the WebDAV working group, and meets our need for a 
globally unique identifier for an active lock.

This specification also references -- by copy -- the XML Namespaces 
processing instruction specification, in appendix 4, section 24.4. WebDAV 
has been an early adopter of XML for its extensibility, 
internationalization, and structuring capabilities. In particular, WebDAV's 
extensible property descriptions benefit from the delegatable namespace for 
new elements provided by XML namespaces. To progress as a self-contained 
Internet standard in the face of the current W3C Working Draft status of 
the XML namespace document, the WebDAV Working Group chose to copy the 
stable core of the XML namespace specification -- a decision which could be 
revisited when revising for Draft status.

Feel free to contact me at <ejw@ics.uci.edu> if you have any questions or 
concerns about the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol, 
draft-ietf-webdav-protocol-08.

- Jim Whitehead
Chair, WEBDAV Working Group

Received on Thursday, 9 April 1998 17:43:03 UTC