2.7 Summary

In the early days of Web authoring, only HTTP itself could be used, however insufficiently, for remotely changing a Web page. Since then, many other protocols have been put to use to allow remote Web authoring, but all have suffered from drawbacks.

Web authoring has improved greatly. Early Web browsers did only Web browsing because editing was much more complicated. When HTML editing tools became more sophisticated, the next step was supporting an Internet protocol so that the Web pages could be changed on the server.

Initially, most users used FTP. Users would edit files on their local machines and then use FTP to copy files manually to the server. However, FTP had some significant defects in addressing, navigation, and performance.

HTTP lacked important features. There was no standard way to create directories copy or move resources, list the contents of directories, or deal with file metadata. The lost update problem could be solved, but not without frustrating users who were unable to reserve files for the duration of an editing session.

Many vendors developed proprietary Web authoring protocols. Although some Web authoring systems with integrated HTML editing developed sophisticated remote authoring capability, these systems FrontPage, AOLPress, Netscape, and Amaya were not interoperable. Most used HTTP with different extensions or FTP with magic addresses.

WebDAV was developed as a standard alternative. None of the proprietary protocols was entirely satisfactory, and the existence of multiple competing protocols caused interoperability problems. The WebDAV Working Group took the best ideas from each proprietary protocol to build a single standard protocol.



WebDAV. Next Generation Collaborative Web Authoring
WebDAV. Next Generation Collaborative Web Authoring
ISBN: 130652083
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 146

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