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FrontPage RecentChanges AboutWikiFeatures WikiNode WebDAV stands for “Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning” (sound familiar?). Sometimes just called “DAV”, it’s an extension of HTTP to allow multiple parties to update and maintain Web resources.
Microsoft Windows users are familiar with DAV through “Web folders” – Microsoft makes DAV resources visible through the main filesystem browser. KDE and Gnome’s Nautilus both have DAV support built-in, too. Subversion, the next-generation CVS replacement, uses DAV for all network traffic.
The question I’d like to raise is: WebDAV and wiki seem to be addressing the same need – group collaboration on Web resources – through different technologies. WebDAV uses HTTP extensions to allow collaboration; wiki uses HTTP POST through standard browsers and other parts of the one-way Web to sneak bidirectionality in.
How could wikis use WebDAV? Would they benefit? Could a DAV-based system be built that maintained wiki’s cultural framework?
I’ve been wondering the same thing: What is their relationship?
It feels to me that wiki stole WebDAV’s thunder.
Immediate questions are things like:
I have never used WebDAV. Part of the problem is that I don’t think I have the tools to participate on it. Do I need a special client to use it? I have Nautilus, (it’s sitting right here on my desktop)- can you recommend a WebDAV website that I can look at? (You can email it to me, lion at speakeasy dt org, if you want to keep it secret.)
I don’t know what WebDAV can do, so, it’s hard to respond. I’d like to know, though.
I, too, am in the dark about WebDav. As little as I know, it seems to have a lot of the features we expect out of wiki, in particular versioning. I think that WebDav is very much at the bytes-and-files level of Web site development – that is, all those nice benefits of WikiText and everything wouldn’t be there. You might be able to fudge it – I could see a simple XML+XSL thing working, maybe – but I think it works more like an FTP share than a Web publishing system.
I actually tried setting up DAV shares on my local Apache instance, and I couldn’t really get anything magical out of Nautilus. I’m going to see what more I can do, and try to report back. I think the possible benefits are:
The experience I’d be looking for is something like the Amaya browser – you just start editing pages, y’know?
Oh, anyways: I’ll try to get DAV working on a public server, and report the URL back here when I have it working. Of course it’d be open – it wouldn’t be wiki if it wasn’t!
OK, so, a little more info here: versioning is not built in to WebDav (despite the name). There’s an extension called Delta-V that makes versioning possible. The Apache mod_dav WebDav implementation doesn’t support Delta-V yet. Not much news on when or if this will happen. The Subversion project is doing a half-compliant Delta-V implementation, but it uses custom extensions and doesn’t provide all features. Their goal is to specifically support Subversion, not to provide a full versioning system.
On the positive side, there’s a project called Catacomb that does do Delta-V. I’m going to try and install it on a server and see what it does. --EvanProdromou
When you install the server, toss me an email (lion at speakeasy dot org-) I’d like to try it out, too. See what it’s like. – LionKimbro
Thanks for the link, Evan! Coincidentally, I just discovered Delta V in the course of trying to install Subversion for an academic project. See the page I just wrote at CommunityWiki:DeltaV.
After very preliminary research, I think I have an answer the question of the relationship between wiki and WebDAV. I bet there was no relationship at first; it sounds like neither one was built with knowledge of the other. But, both are designed to allow users to edit web pages on a server.
A wiki uses HTML Forms to allow users to edit web pages on a server. Wikis are a class of CGI programs acting as servers. Wikis support versioning.
WebDAV is a protocol to allow clients to edit web pages on servers. WebDAV doesn’t support versioning, but WebDAV + Delta V does.
Wikis are server programs. WebDAV is a protocol. Wikis could support the WebDAV protocol, but right now they don’t.
Right now, wikis have no protocol. This means that there is no standard way for automated clients to work with wiki servers. Human users can interact via HTML forms, but each wiki has a slightly different forms-based UI. When people do write software to act as clients to wiki servers, they are reduced to screen scraping. Which is one reason why I started the WikiGateway project; to collect all this screen scraping Once and For All into a reusable library. WikiGateway will also expose standard APIs for different wiki servers, such as WikiXMLRpc, Atom, and, someday, WebDAV.
It seems to me that Wikis and WebDAV may be a perfect match. WebDAV + Delta V is basically a protocol to formalize the operations that users perform on the PageDatabase already, via HTML forms. WikiXMLRpc is probably essentially a proper subset of WebDAV.
So, perhaps we should standardize on WebDAV + DeltaV as the standard for automated interaction with wiki servers. WikiGateway would serve as a go-between (proxy) to mediate between WebDAV+DeltaV clients and wiki servers which don’t support WebDAV.
See CommunityWiki:DeltaV for thoughts on how Subversion ties in.
By the way, you may be interested in SubWiki, too. – BayleShanks
The way WebDAV is was talked about initially, one would think it was a file transfer protocol necessarily mapped onto a real file system. It’s not. It’s just a bunch of extended HTTP commands. There don’t need to be real files any more that there do for web pages. Glad that got cleared up later on.
Allowing WebDAV access to the source of wikipages with something like /moin.cgi/SomePage?access=dav would be useful for storing things like calendar files with sunbird; this would prevent accidents and provide users with an undo feature, though perhaps not one they could use conveniently directly from a calendar client. One could access the old versions as other calendars (by supplying the URL for the old version), but that’s rather ungainly. Perhaps Sunbird should support DeltaV as well as WebDAV? Someone might suggest it over at http://wiki.mozilla.org guest