1.2 Third-Generation Web Authoring

The third generation of Web authoring software is based on WebDAV, the first open standard for Web authoring. This generation started in 1998 when WebDAV became a Proposed Standard. By 2002, WebDAV-based Web authoring had achieved wide interoperability, availability, and deployment. HTML authoring tools released after the year 2000 commonly support WebDAV to save content to any given Web server. As a result, the Web can finally be as empowering for individual content creators as it is for content consumers.

The name "WebDAV" stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning." Versioning automatically preserves past versions of Web pages on the server, and WebDAV designers wanted to allow the client to access and restore past versions of Web pages. Because it's rather complicated, versioning was not standardized in the original WebDAV specification, but it was standardized separately three years later. Versioning is important for large, complicated Web sites and for Web-based source code repositories, but it is not needed in all Web authoring scenarios. For example, Photoshop and many other Adobe applications support WebDAV but not versioning, yet users still get the benefit of sharing files and coordinating multiple authors online.

WebDAV works transparently with existing Web content by extending HTTP. HTTP allows reading or browsing documents on the Internet, but it doesn't do a good job of allowing authoring. WebDAV adds new functionality within the HTTP framework in a way that interacts seamlessly with existing HTTP clients and servers and existing Web content.

WebDAV has already achieved wide deployment on many platforms, in software from many vendors. It can be found in modern versions of Web servers such as Apache and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). It can be found in Web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE). Desktop applications, namely Microsoft Office 2000 and Adobe software, including Photoshop, Acrobat, and GoLive, are adopting WebDAV. Finally, WebDAV client functionality is being implemented in modern operating systems at the file system level, in Windows XP and Mac OS X.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, www.ietf.org) standardized WebDAV after years of design work and discussion coordinated through an IETF Working Group. The WebDAV Working Group completed initial design work in 1998 and submitted a draft for approval. In February 1999, WebDAV was accepted as a standards-track specification and given the identification RFC2518. This book focuses on the functionality defined in the original WebDAV RFC.

IETF Documents

"RFC" stands for "Request For Comments" and identifies a document published by the IETF. RFCs are most often named by their RFC number, rather than author and year, so I've taken the same approach in references in this book.