What is WebDAV

WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning. Authoring is the process of creating, updating and managing content located on a Web server; ''distributed'' means that a document can have several authors and they can be geographically scattered; and ''web-based'' reflects the fact that the content is manipulated over the Web, i.e. the content is managed throught the same means it is viewed and browsed. Thus WebDAV transforms Web into a writable medium. Finally, ''versioning'' means that different revisions of a resource can be tracked, but it turned out to be a complicated matter so versioning was dropped out of the original specification and was developed separately.

WebDAV is defined in RFC 2518 as a protocol that extends HTTP by adding new HTTP methods, headers and status codes. Since its only prerequisite is HTTP, it makes it easy to install and configure and it inherits the well-developed HTTP infrastucture.