Member → The Art of Consensus → 

Publishing with WebDAV

This Guidebook is the collected wisdom of the W3C Group Chairs and other collaborators.

Nearby: SettingUpWebDav

This is still experimental, maintained on a best-efforts basis. (for now)

What is WebDAV?

WebDAV is an HTTP-based protocol that allows accessing the content of an HTTP server as a networked filesystems; to put it simply, it allows to edit directly a Web site as if it were an additional disk on your computer.

Can I use WebDAV to edit W3C Web site?

There is preliminary support to edit W3C Web site using WebDAV, but due to the number of interoperability issues with the protocol, this support is only experimental. If you have suggestions for specific clients, support, help for people, please contribute to the Tools wiki on WebDAV. The following clients have been reported to work with the current implementation on edit.w3.org:

Linux

• Cadaver (text-based), available on all OS
• Konqueror, KDE file manager on Linux
• nd, a Unix command-line based tool, that can be combined with eldav, an emacs interface to WebDAV
• davfs2, a Linux kernel module
  Add a line like the following (changing your username) in your /etc/fstab and run the command mount /mnt/www.w3.org (as root or through sudo). You will be prompted for username and password, it is possible to save those in a configuration file.

  http://edit.w3.org   /mnt/www.w3.org   davfs   noauto,user   0   0

Mac OSX

• OSX WebDAVFS Webdav mount: in the Finder, select 'Go' menu, click on 'Connect to server...' (Apple-K key) and enter the URL to the WebDAV 'Server Address' that you want to open (e.g. https://edit.w3.org/Guide), or select a 'Favorite Server' already registered. You will be prompted for you login name and password.
  
• Goliath, for OSX

Windows

2012-08-27 Ralph believes that the only step needed here is the step starting 'Rightclick' -- i.e. just create a shortcut to \\edit.w3.org@SSL\TLD where TLD is the top-level directory to which you wish to connect. It is no longer necessary to edit the registry to enable Basic Auth.

• Instructions for Setting up WebDAV in Windows 7:
  • Start -> Run -> Services.msc
  • Start your Webclient service. Set the properties so it will start automatically next time you boot Windows 7

    

  • Rightclick anywhere on your desktop and choose 'new shortcut'
  • Use this format for WebDAV folders: \\your_webdav_server_domain@SLL\rootwebdavfolder\path\to\folder.
    Path would look like: \\edit.w3.org@SSL\Team

    

• Windows XP: Windows WebFolders, but requiring to enable Basic Authentication. To enable it you can apply this Registry file to enable Basic authentication and then restart your computer. (As described on the Microsoft website). Also, you should use thelatest version of Windows WebFolders, as described in the MS Knowledge Base. Not using the latest version may lead to issues with capitalized files and folders.
• XMLSpy Entreprise Edition, starting with release 2005R3.
• EngInSite DataFreeway has been reported to work.
• Dreamweaver's WebDAV has been reported to work.

It is not recommended to use any other client-side implementations as of today. Yves is working on improving supports for other implementations, but has only limited availabilities to do so.

Useful information on the use of WebDAV with some clients

• While using Windows, avoid creating new folders in the remote file system, you should create one locally, then drag the whole directory at its final location. Failing to do so will just create a "New Folder" directory that can't be removed. Not a big deal, but we want to avoid cluttering the editing space.
• Be VERY careful when deleting a file, if something goes wrong, see next point
• It is impossible to delete a directory, because of the use of CVS in the back end, and because it would be very time consuming to recover from an unwanted deletion of an important directory.
• Everything is CVS based, you can access the CVS interface with your browser if you run into an unexpected behaviour, when you edit in http://edit.w3.org/dir1/dir2/sample.html (or \\edit.w3.org\dir1\dir2\sample.html, then the CVS form to control the directory should be http://edit.w3.org/dir1/dir2/CVS It allows you to enter commit information, revert to a previous version, fix other issues...

Future Plans

• A new version of Digest Authentication interoperable with all clients (if such thing is possible)