5.6 Summary

WebDAV reuses the HTTP methods, particularly OPTIONS, GET, PUT, and DELETE, to fully support remote authoring. A few new status codes are defined for WebDAV-specific errors in response to these existing methods.

WebDAV URLs are HTTP URLs but with a few more restrictions in how they're constructed. The directories that contain a resource must be included in the path part of that resource's URL, just like file paths in local file systems. Collection URLs are more defined in WebDAV and must end in a slash (/).

Support for WebDAV on a Web server can be discovered with the OPTIONS method. The OPTIONS method can be sent to either the server as a whole or to specific URLs, because specific resources might have different features. The OPTIONS response shows which WebDAV features are supported.

The GET method works as it does in HTTP. Authoring clients only have a few extra considerations when using GET, such as the need to make sure that the entire resource was retrieved.

The PUT method works as it does in HTTP. Authoring clients also need to consider how to create new resources without overwriting existing resources and how PUT performs with large files or a large number of files.

The DELETE method works as it does in HTTP. In addition, the DELETE method may be used to delete multiple resources by addressing a collection. Because DELETE can address multiple resources, WebDAV defines a new response body for DELETE to show multiple errors.

Although WebDAV can theoretically allow GET and PUT to author source code, in practice this doesn't work. The specification doesn't provide enough information to know how to author the source files that generate dynamic Web resources, particularly when multiple source files are involved.