To be sure, XML deserves much of the attention it's getting, but the fanfare might be obscuring work on a number of other new foundational technologies that can also impact the future of the Net. Near the top of that list might be WebDAV , short for World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning. WebDAV includes facilities for setting and retrieving metadata properties, such as the title or author of a document, encoded in XML form. WebDAV also lets users list, copy, move, and delete resources on the server by using URLs rather than by directly accessing the server's file system.
Work continues to extend or supplement WebDAV functionality in several areas.
One initiative is the Delta-V working group, which is developing ways to manage multiple versions of documents on a WebDAV server. Another group focuses on access control, developing ways to manage user accounts and privileges remotely. The basic WebDAV specification is widely supported in a range of software for Web authoring and content management, including commercial and open-source software and desktop and server products. One of the most active commercial supporters of WebDAV is Microsoft , which includes support in a number of its products, including Windows 2000, Office 2000, and Internet Explorer. The core release of the next major version of the server, the Apache 2.0, will have WebDAV support built in.