RFC 2291 (rfc2291) - Page 2 of 21

Requirements for a Distributed Authoring and Versioning Protocol for the World Wide Web

RFC 2291          Distributed Authoring and Versioning     February 1998


   possible that a single mechanism could simultaneously satisfy several
   requirements.

   This document reflects the consensus of the WWW Distributed Authoring
   and Versioning working group (WebDAV) as to the functionality that
   should be standardized to support distributed authoring and
   versioning on the Web.  As with any set of requirements, practical
   considerations may make it impossible to satisfy them all.  It is the
   intention of the WebDAV working group to come as close as possible to
   satisfying them in the specifications that make up the WebDAV
   protocol.

2. Rationale

   Current Web standards contain functionality which enables the editing
   of Web content at a remote location, without direct access to the
   storage media via an operating system. This capability is exploited
   by several existing HTML distributed authoring tools, and by a
   growing number of mainstream applications (e.g., word processors)
   which allow users to write (publish) their work to an HTTP server. To
   date, experience from the HTML authoring tools has shown they are
   unable to meet their users' needs using the facilities of Web
   standards. The consequence of this is either postponed introduction
   of distributed authoring capability, or the addition of nonstandard
   extensions to the HTTP protocol or other Web standards.  These
   extensions, developed in isolation, are not interoperable.

   Other authoring applications have wanted to access document
   repositories or version control systems through Web gateways, and
   have been similarly frustrated.  Where this access is available at
   all, it is through nonstandard extensions to HTTP or other standards
   that force clients to use a different interface for each vendor's
   service.

   This document describes requirements for a set of standard extensions
   to HTTP that would allow distributed Web authoring tools to provide
   the functionality their users need by means of the same standard
   syntax across all compliant servers. The broad categories of
   functionality that need to be standardized are:

        Properties
        Links
        Locking
        Reservations
        Retrieval of Unprocessed Source
        Partial Write
        Name Space Manipulation
        Collections



Slein, et. al.               Informational