- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 11:50:07 PDT
- To: Jon Radoff <jradoff@novalink.com>
- CC: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> As far as I can see, there is nothing within WEBDAV that can't be
> done already within the context of the HTTP server infrastructure.
> Therefore, I am at a loss as to why it is to anyone's advantage
> to produce a protocol level standard to provide the functionality.
We started here. Yes, FrontPage & Navigator Gold are both shipping.
However, they require different and incompatible server extensions.
AOL Press had their own set. While everything COULD BE deployed
with the current server infrastructure, there wasn't interoperability.
The vendors wanted to create interoperability between different
authoring tools and different back-ends, so thus we have a standards
group to standardize those extensions. It seems they all currently
require server extensions, and people install them, but of course
you can't get your HTTP server to do something it doesn't do now
("versioning") without installing some software on it that actually
implements the functionality. And this added functionality doesn't
actually do you any good if you don't have clients that use it.
However, the clients are there and implemented, and the servers are
there and implemented, we just want some standards so that future
releases of those clients and servers can be cross-functional.
Yes, it will require deployment of new versions of some of those
tools in order to get that to happen, but that's what always happens.
I thought this was all in the charter. Maybe there's something in
the latest drafts that doesn't do this the way you think it should
be done?
Larry
Received on Friday, 2 May 1997 14:51:42 UTC