Requirements for a Distributed Authoring and Versioning Protocol for the World Wide Web
RFC 2291
Network Working Group J. Slein
Request for Comments: 2291 Xerox Corporation
Category: Informational F. Vitali
University of Bologna
E. Whitehead
U.C. Irvine
D. Durand
Boston University
February 1998
Requirements for a Distributed Authoring and Versioning
Protocol for the World Wide Web
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1998). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
Current World Wide Web (WWW or Web) standards provide simple support
for applications which allow remote editing of typed data. In
practice, the existing capabilities of the WWW have proven inadequate
to support efficient, scalable remote editing free of overwriting
conflicts. This document presents a list of features in the form of
requirements for a Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning protocol
which, if implemented, would improve the efficiency of common remote
editing operations, provide a locking mechanism to prevent overwrite
conflicts, improve link management support between non-HTML data
types, provide a simple attribute-value metadata facility, provide
for the creation and reading of container data types, and integrate
versioning into the WWW.
1. Introduction
This document describes functionality which, if incorporated in an
extension to the existing HTTP proposed standard [HTTP], would allow
tools for remote loading, editing and saving (publishing) of various
media types on the WWW to interoperate with any compliant Web server.
As much as possible, this functionality is described without
suggesting a proposed implementation, since there are many ways to
perform the functionality within the WWW framework. It is also
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RFC 2291 Distributed Authoring and Versioning February 1998
possible that a single mechanism could simultaneously satisfy several
requirements.
This document reflects the consensus of the WWW Distributed Authoring
and Versioning working group (WebDAV) as to the functionality that
should be standardized to support distributed authoring and
versioning on the Web. As with any set of requirements, practical
considerations may make it impossible to satisfy them all. It is the
intention of the WebDAV working group to come as close as possible to
satisfying them in the specifications that make up the WebDAV
protocol.
2. Rationale
Current Web standards contain functionality which enables the editing
of Web content at a remote location, without direct access to the
storage media via an operating system. This capability is exploited
by several existing HTML distributed authoring tools, and by a
growing number of mainstream applications (e.g., word processors)
which allow users to write (publish) their work to an HTTP server. To
date, experience from the HTML authoring tools has shown they are
unable to meet their users' needs using the facilities of Web
standards. The consequence of this is either postponed introduction
of distributed authoring capability, or the addition of nonstandard
extensions to the HTTP protocol or other Web standards. These
extensions, developed in isolation, are not interoperable.
Other authoring applications have wanted to access document
repositories or version control systems through Web gateways, and
have been similarly frustrated. Where this access is available at
all, it is through nonstandard extensions to HTTP or other standards
that force clients to use a different interface for each vendor's
service.
This document describes requirements for a set of standard extensions
to HTTP that would allow distributed Web authoring tools to provide
the functionality their users need by means of the same standard
syntax across all compliant servers. The broad categories of
functionality that need to be standardized are:
Properties
Links
Locking
Reservations
Retrieval of Unprocessed Source
Partial Write
Name Space Manipulation
Collections
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RFC 2291 Distributed Authoring and Versioning February 1998
Versioning
Variants
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