Like it or not, the Web has been co-opted. Its grassroots foundations have long since been paved over by large corporations looking to assert their influence over the direction of Web standards and technology. When did the Web "jump the shark"? With the advent of banner ads? When the W3C contemplated allowing royalties on standards? (Take your pick.)

WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a standardized set of extensions to the HTTP protocol (the basis of the World Wide Web) that allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote Web servers. WebDAV has widespread vendor support in the industry and is used with many browsers, editors, file systems, document repositories, and databases. The use of a WebDAV enabled client (such as xmlspy® 2004) in conjunction with a WebDAV enabled server changes the way users interact with the World Wide Web. While today the Web is largely a read-only resource, WebDAV has the potential to transform the Internet into a fully writeable medium capable of supporting collaboration and distributed file sharing.

INCUBATING IN THE standards process for several years, the WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) protocol -- designed to add interoperability and collaborative capabilities to the Internet -- has been steadily making its way into the everyday tools of business users and stands poised to transform how users interact with the Internet.

Tamino WebDAV Server is an implementation of the WebDAV standard - an extension of HTTP/1.1 - that provides drag&drop access to data stored in the Tamino XML Server.

This plugin allows Frontier's Website Framework and Manila static rendering output, and Radio UserLand upstreaming via WebDAV. It provides limited support for WebDAV as specified by RFC 2518. The PUT, DELETE and MKCOL methods, and basic HTTP authentication only are supported. (That means: use it on a secure network or wrap it securely).

The irony was intense. The frustrating, awkward nature of collaborative authoring over the Internet became increasingly evident as draft after draft of the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol specification was edited, spelling out how collaboration could be much easier, much more fluid, if leveraged on the Web's standard infrastructure. The collaboration scheme the authors used when writing the specification was typical: each draft required the author to make the revisions, then e-mail changes back to the other authors.

Web DAV is a protocol that allows convenient connectivity between a remote server and local workstation. Web DAV can now be used with WebCT 3.8 to provide true "Drag and Drop" file transfer capabilities.

WebDAV is an XML based protocol, it defines a set of new methods (PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, MKCOL, COPY, MOVE, LOCK, UNLOCK) and a set of new headers (DAV, Depth, If, Destination, ...). A good overview of WebDAV: WebDAV in 2 minutes

Catacomb is a WebDAV repository module for use with the Apache WebDAV module, mod_dav. Apache mod_dav parses WebDAV and DeltaV protocol requests into operations on a repository providing persistent storage of resources and their properties. The default repository for mod_dav is provided by a separate module, mod_dav_fs, which stores resource bodies as files in the filesystem, and stores properties in a (G)DBM database.