WebDAV - History

History

WebDAV began in 1996 when Jim Whitehead 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. Tim Berners-Lee's original vision of the Web was that of a medium for both reading and writing. In fact, Berners-Lee's first web browser, called WorldWideWeb, was able to both view and edit web pages; but, as the Web grew, it became a read-only medium for most users. Whitehead and other like-minded people wanted to fix that limitation.

The W3C meeting decided to form an IETF working group, because the new effort would lead to extensions to HTTP, which was being standardized at the IETF.

As work began on the protocol, it became clear that handling both distributed authoring and versioning would involve too much work and that the tasks would have to be separated. The WebDAV group focused on distributed authoring, and left versioning for the future. Versioning was added later by the Delta-V extension — see the Extensions section below.

The protocol consists of a set of new methods and headers for use in HTTP. The added methods include:

• PROPFIND — used to retrieve properties, stored as XML, from a resource. It is also overloaded to allow one to retrieve the collection structure (a.k.a. directory hierarchy) of a remote system.
• PROPPATCH — used to change and delete multiple properties on a resource in a single atomic act
• MKCOL — used to create collections (a.k.a. a directory)
• COPY — used to copy a resource from one URI to another
• MOVE — used to move a resource from one URI to another
• LOCK — used to put a lock on a resource. WebDAV supports both shared and exclusive locks.
• UNLOCK — used to remove a lock from a resource