Chapter 19. Publishing Systems

How do you create web pages and get them onto a web server? In the dark ages of the Web (let's say, 1995), you might have hand-crafted your HTML in a text editor and manually uploaded the content to the web server using FTP. This procedure was painful, difficult to coordinate with coworkers, and not particularly secure.

Modern-day publishing tools make it much more convenient to create, publish, and manage web content. Today, you can interactively edit web content as you'll see it on the screen and publish that content to servers with a single click, while being notified of any files that have changed.

Many of the tools that support remote publishing of content use extensions to the HTTP protocol. In this chapter, we explain two important technologies for web-content publishing based on HTTP: FrontPage and DAV.