Distributed Authoring Requirements Draft

The first revision of the document "Requirements on HTTP for
Distributed Content Editing" is now available as Internet
Draft, <draft-whitehead-http-distreq-00.txt>.  This document
represents the consensus view of a currently unaffiliated
working group considering issues of distributed authoring and
versioning on the WWW.  It is available in HTML format from URL:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/draft-whitehead-http-distreq.html

It is my understanding from email with Larry Masinter that the
topic of distributed authoring is currently not in scope for
inclusion in HTTP/1.2, and will most likely be specified as a
future PEP extension.  However, you may find that the issues
discussed in this draft affect other proposals which are under
being considered for HTTP/1.2.

Discussion of this draft takes place on the mailing list
<w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>.  Please send mail with subject
"subscribe" to <w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org> to join.  Your
comments on this draft are welcomed.

>From the draft:

Abstract

The HyperText Transfer Protocol, version 1.1 (HTTP/1.1), provides
simple support for applications which allow remote editing of typed
data. In practice, the existing capabilities of HTTP/1.1 have proven
inadequate to support efficient, scalable remote editing free of
overwriting conflicts.  This document presents 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, and provide for the creation and
reading of container data types. These requirements are also supportive
of versioning capability.


Previous discussion of this draft has been archived at:

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Archives/Public/w3c-dist-auth/

Background information on distributed authoring is available at:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/

- Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>

Received on Thursday, 12 September 1996 18:37:53 UTC