History of Web Authoring and WebDAV

Since its origins HTTP supported some basic authoring - it defines the PUT method which allows clients to upload an entity to a Web server. In fact the first Web browser written by Tim Berners Lee supported not only page viewing but also page editing. However, the PUT method cannot create directories on the server, so it is not suitable for sites with complex infrastructure and other means for their publishing to the Web Server had to be used.

Some of the most popular ways are using FTP, using SSH and using NFS or shared folders. All these ways have several disadvantages: first, one must manage their Web content using software not specifically designed for this; second, one should know how to match the web site hierarchy with the file system hierarchy on the server; third, they do not allow attaching additional metadata to the files like the name of the author or the date of creation.

Then some proprietary publishing software appeared, which used not so standardized methods. For example, Microsoft Front Page can publish content using the POST method, but the problem is that sometimes the POST method is forbidden for security reasons. Netscape Navigator Gold could place files on the server using HTTP PUT of FTP, but it had problems with multiple authors, because both the PUT method and FTP can override others' changes. Strictly speaking, this is still possible via WebDAV and this can be eliminated only via versioning, but it was excluded from RFC 2518. It is possible, however, to develop a publising system using version controlling system (VCS), but again this steps outside of the Web and those systems tend to be complicated for the authors. Also the solutions with VCS, FTP and SSH require opening one more TCP port on a given machine which can be a security issue.