The Working Group on Distributed Authoring and Versioning on the World Wide Web (WEDBAV) began in May, 1996. However, there has been discussion and development of distributed authoring technology since the very earliest days of the Web. This talk will present a history of distributed authoring, outline the goals and current activities of the WEBDAV working group, and give an overview of the functionality in the current draft protocol specification for extensions to the HyperText Transfer Protocol. Information on how to become more active in the working group will also be presented.

The WEBDAV working group considers the following issues to be within its scope:

• Locking (write, read, no-modify, partial resource locking)
• Copy
• Move/Rename
• Resource redirection (e.g. 3xx response codes)
• Containers (creation, modification, container-specific semantics)
• Attributes (creation, access, modification, query, naming)
• Relationships
• Notification of intent to edit
• Destroy, Delete, Undelete
• Access control
• Use of existing authentication schemes
• Unprocessed source retrieval
• Informing proxies of an action's impact
• Versioning:
  • Checkin/Checkout
  • History graph
  • Differencing
  • Automatic Merging
  • Naming and accessing resource versions

Taken together, this functionality provides an open infrastructure for the development of applications for aynchronous collaboration on large-grain objects. The functionality also provides a framework for Web metadata which is consistent with existing metadata proposals such as the Dublin core, REL/REV link types, and WebMap. The specification also provides significant extensions to the Web for remote name space manipulation.