WebDAV

WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) allowing user agents to collaboratively edit content directly in an HTTP server, which may act as a file server. It provides facilities for concurrency control and namespace operations, thus allowing the Web to be viewed as a writeable medium and not just a read-only medium. WebDAV is defined in RFC 4918 by a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The WebDAV protocol provides a framework for users to create, change and move documents on a server. The most important features include the maintenance of properties about an author or modification date, namespace management, collections, and overwrite protection. Maintenance of properties includes such things as the creation, removal, and querying of file information. Namespace management deals with the ability to copy and move web pages within a server's namespace. Collections deal with the creation, removal, and listing of various resources. Lastly, overwrite protection handles aspects related to the locking of files. It takes advantage of existing technologies such as Transport Layer Security, digest access authentication or XML to satisfy those requirements. Many modern operating systems (such as GNOME Desktop Environment for Linux) provide built-in client-side support for WebDAV.