FYI: New IETF WEBDAV Working Group

A working group on World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning
(WEBDAV) has been formed in the Applications Area of the Internet
Engineering Task Force.  Keith Moore and Harald Alvestrand are the
Applications Area Directors, and Keith Moore is the Area Advisor for the
working group.  The Chair of the working group is Jim Whitehead, a Ph.D.
student in the Dept. of Information and Computer Science at the University
of California, Irvine.

This working group will define the HTTP extensions necessary to enable
distributed web authoring tools to be broadly interoperable, while
supporting user needs.

As a broad overview, functionality under consideration by the WEBDAV WG
includes:

* Overwrite prevention:  Preventing the "lost update" problem where
modifications are lost as first one author, then another writes their
changes without merging the other author's changes.

* Metadata: The ability to create, remove, modify and query information
about Web resources, such as author, creation date, etc.

* Name space management: The ability to copy and move Web resources, and to
receive a listing of resources within a particular container (such as
filesystem directory-like containers).

* Version management: The ability to perform simple revision control (e.g.
like RCS, SCCS, CVS) so that important revisions of a document can be
stored for later retrieval.  Also, the support of asynchronous
collaboration where two or more authors work on the same document in
parallel revision tracks.

* Linking: The ability to create links between resources of any media type
(e.g., fully-specified LINK and UNLINK methods).


WEBDAV issues are discussed on the mailing list "w3c-dist-auth@w3.org."  To
subscribe to the mailing list, send an email with subject "subscribe" to
"w3c-dist-auth-request@w3.org".  The World Wide Web Consortium graciously
hosts this mailing list.

For more information on WEBDAV, please consult:

  WEBDAV Home Page:
  http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/

  WEBDAV Introduction article
  http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/intro/webdav_intro.ps
  http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/intro/webdav_intro.pdf

  WEBDAV WG Charter:
  http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/charter.html

  WEBDAV Requirements Document:
  http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/webdav-req-00.html


Finally, I'd like to acknowledge and thank Larry Masinter, Dan Connolly,
Keith Moore, Ralph Swick, Harald Alvestrand, Jim Miller, and Roy Fielding
for their assistance along the path to the formation of this working group.


- Jim Whitehead <ejw@ics.uci.edu>
  http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/

Received on Monday, 24 March 1997 17:29:12 UTC