Re: WebDAV capabilities in HTML?

The biggest advantage I can see is that having PUT and DELETE  
capabilities in HTML forms would allow server-side implementations to  
be generic (e.g., Apache modules), rather than application-specific  
code. This is attractive from development resources/process and  
security perspectives.

I've been experimenting with using XMLHttpRequest to POST/PUT things  
from forms, see:
   http://www.mnot.net/javascript/json_form.js
Sorry, no docs yet. Basically, this looks for forms with a particular  
MIME type and takes over the submission process, overriding the  
content type, request body and request method.

Note that some browser vendors are wary of generating request methods  
other than POST or GET, because they're concerned about security  
implications. This is an ongoing discussion in the Web APIs WG (which  
is specific to XHR, but I imagine the same objections would have to  
be overcome for a forms language, given that it would likely be  
scriptable, eventually).
   http://www.w3.org/2006/webapi/

Cheers,


On 2006/10/11, at 9:09 AM, Jim Whitehead wrote:

>
> All,
>
> I am interested in your ideas on what WebDAV capabilities inside  
> HTML might look like.
>
> A Master's student at UC Santa Cruz is starting to explore this  
> idea. So far we are able to grab properties from a web resource and  
> insert them into an HTML page, and there are also facilities for  
> iterating over all resources in a collection while grabbing  
> properties and inserting them into the HTML. At present, we have  
> only explored read-only scenarios.
>
> So, what kinds of scenarios could be supported by DAV-in-HTML, and  
> what kinds of capabilities would HTML need to support to make this  
> possible?
>
> Being able to write to properties seems potentially useful, though  
> it's unclear whether this is better than using native HTML forms  
> and POSTing data.
>
> - Jim
>

--
Mark Nottingham
mnot@yahoo-inc.com

Received on Thursday, 12 October 2006 17:35:52 UTC