RFC 2291 (rfc2291) - Page 2 of 21
Requirements for a Distributed Authoring and Versioning Protocol for the World Wide Web
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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