Subject: Protocol Action: 'HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring - WebDAV' to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 16:41:15 -0400

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.

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