From: Eric Armstrong <eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com>
WebDAV is something that Adam Cheyer mentioned in his
initial presentation. Jon Bosak recently pointed me to it again.
It appears to be worth a very close look.
http://www.webdav.org/
"Briefly: WebDAV stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and
Versioning". It is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol which
allows
users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers."
Does this sound familiar to anyone?
http://www.asptoday.com/articles/20000204.htm
http://www.asptoday.com/articles/20000211.htm
http://www.asptoday.com/articles/20000218.htm
Has a three-part series on WebDAV.
From the first article:
---------------------
"WebDAV ... extends the simple (HTTP) request/send mechanism
(with a) whole bunch of new commands...such as:
...
Editing resources in place (...without downloading them first).
Copying, moving or deleting resources.
Setting access permissions on resources.
Locking resources
So, what we are getting here is an ability to update files on a
Web server. WebDAV turns the Web into a writeable medium...
"The very first Web browser was also an editor - it didn't limit you to
only viewing the document. The initial idea of the Web wasn't a
read-only store of information, but a living, updateable store. It was
only because the first released browser
was a read-only, that we've got the current situation.
-----------------------
What WebDAV is missing
---------------------------
What WebDAV is missing is the notion of document-hierarchy. So it's
missing functions like multiple views or tagging and reuse of arbitrary
paragraphs or sections. It's also missing automatic attribution. But
some
of these features can be built into the client that uses the WebDAV
protocol.
For the versioning to be useful, though, the "document" is going to
have to be one of two aspects of an information node -- either it's
text content or the list of child nodes that descends from it. That way,
changing either the text of a node or the organization of its children
will produce a new version of the node.
Note on Versioning
--------------------
As a general issue, "versioning" appears to have two orthogonal
meanings in a hierarchical document.
One meaning is the point-by-point changes made to individual
nodes in a document. One node may change 15 times. The next
to it might change not at all.
The other meaning for "versioning" is the version of the document
that is published. So version 1.1 of a document might include
version 15 of one node, and version 0 of another node.
We probably need two different terms for these meanings to
keep them clear.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Mar 15 2000 - 14:19:29 PST