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The WebDAV group focused on distributed authoring, and left versioning for the future. The meetings resulted in the formation of an IETF working group because the new effort would lead to extensions to HTTP, which the IETF had started to standardize.Īs work began on the protocol, it became clear that handling both distributed authoring and versioning together would involve too much work and that the tasks would have to be separated.
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Whitehead and other like-minded people wanted to transcend that limitation. In fact, Berners-Lee's first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, could both view and edit web pages but, as the Web grew, it became a read-only medium for most users. Tim Berners-Lee's original vision of the Web involved a medium for both reading and writing. WebDAV began in 1996 when Jim Whitehead, a PhD graduate from UC Irvine, worked with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to host two meetings to discuss the problem of distributed authoring on the World Wide Web with interested people. 5.1 Additional Windows-specific extensions.4 Other documents published through IETF.3 Documents produced by the working group.Many modern operating systems provide built-in client-side support for WebDAV. It takes advantage of existing technologies such as Transport Layer Security, digest access authentication or XML to satisfy those requirements. Lastly, overwrite protection handles aspects related to the locking of files. Collections deal with the creation, removal, and listing of various resources. Namespace management deals with the ability to copy and move web pages within a server's namespace. Maintenance of properties includes such things as the creation, removal, and querying of file information. The most important features include the maintenance of properties about an author or modification date, namespace management, collections, and overwrite protection. The WebDAV protocol provides a framework for users to create, change and move documents on a server. WebDAV is defined in RFC 4918 by a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). WebDAV ( Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents directly in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for concurrency control and namespace operations, thus allowing Web to be viewed as a writeable, collaborative medium and not just a read-only medium. ( September 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please improve this by adding secondary or tertiary sources. This article relies too much on references to primary sources.
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