The IESG has approved the following document: - 'HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring - WebDAV ' <draft-ietf-webdav-rfc2518bis-18.txt> as a Proposed Standard This document is the product of the WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Ted Hardie and Lisa Dusseault. A URL of this Internet-Draft is: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-webdav-rfc2518bis-18.txt Technical Summary WebDAV consists of a set of methods, headers, and content-types ancillary to HTTP/1.1 for the management of resource properties, creation and management of resource collections, URL namespace manipulation, and resource locking (collision avoidance). RFC2518 was published in February 1999, and this specification contains clarifications and makes a small number of revisions, mostly due to interoperability experience. It is being recycled at Proposed, rather than advancing to draft. Working Group Summary After several years of implementation experience with RFC 2518, there was overwhelming consensus within the WebDAV Working Group to clarify under-specified or confusing parts of the specification to make it easier to build interoperable implementations. A small number of active participants contributed to the development of this document. While some of the participants had very different views about the best way to describe a protocol, there is broad consensus about the normative content of the document and rough consensus that the informative and explanatory language in the document improves the quality of the specification and makes it easier for implementors to know what needs to be implemented. It is easier to understand, makes some simplification to the protocol to make it easier for implementers, and clarifies under-specified parts of the protocol. There does remain some dissent that this document is the best that could be achieved, and there were proposals to continue work based on other starting points. The number of contributors committed to that course of action was, however, smaller than would be normal for an active working group. Publication of this document provides a checkpoint of improvements to serve as the basis of implementation and potential later work. It does not close off later improvement. Protocol Quality While there is no formal matrix of implementations, the core parts of this specification have been implemented and subject to interoperability testing over many years. There have been multiple reviewers of this document, including both detailed review of the whole and specific review of areas known to be contentious (e.g. locking). The consensus appears to be that this document is a better guide than RFC 2518, which it would replace. The responsible Area Director is Ted Hardie; the document shepherd is Cullen Jennings. _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
