Chapter 2. History of Web and Collaborative Authoring

There's a lot of background to cover in order to understand a protocol like WebDAV. First, WebDAV extends HTTP, so it's important to understand HTTP. Second, the WebDAV designers were familiar with many existing proprietary authoring protocols as well as email protocols and FTP, so WebDAV was designed with their features and flaws in mind. These older protocols point up WebDAV's advantages. This chapter also contrasts the way in which WebDAV solves certain problems with the way the problems were solved (or not solved) elsewhere.

I'll cover Web site authoring solutions first because WebDAV was designed to do Web site authoring. However, I'll also compare email, FTP, and HTTP/1.1 (without WebDAV extensions) because those three protocols combined to form the only standards-based Internet collaborative Web authoring "solution" before WebDAV.