WebDAV is a working group within the Application Area of the Internet Engineering Task Force that works cooperatively with the WWW Consortium. This article presents the rationale for standards in Web distributed authoring and gives a detailed overview of proposed features and capabilities in four areas: metadata support; name space management; overwrite protection; and versioning.

Initial proposals favor defining metadata by links (rather than by attribute values), with bidirectional typed links stored externally to Web resources. However, there is still debate over whether metadata should be stored individually or in packages. Name space management capabilities are defined for copy, move, delete, and directory listing operations. A new media type for hierarchically ordered collections is proposed, but access methods are not yet determined. Strict locking is proposed to handle overwrite protection, but without notification. This would be a change from the current HTTP protocol, in which a client makes a request and the server responds. Versioning specifications are still under consideration, with a tension between flexible clients adaptable to varying semantics and the desire to keep clients simple.

This article gives clear explanations of the philosophies of this important work in progress. A companion article by Slein et al. [1] gives more detailed functional requirements. Up-to-date information is available from the WebDAV group through the Web at http://www.ics.uci.edu/˜ejw/authoring/.