Mac OS X Hacks

Turning on WebDAV

Share a space on your web server for remote file sharing and collaboration.

WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning, also called DAV) is a set of extensions to HTTP/1.1 (Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the protocol spoken by web browsers and servers) allowing you to edit documents on a remote web server. DAV provides support for:

Editing

Creating, updating, deleting

Properties

Title, author, publication date, and so on

Collections

Analogous to a filesystem’s directory or desktop folder

Locking

Prevents the confusion and data corruption caused by two or more people editing the same content at the same time

WebDAV is platform-independent, both in terms of client and server. This means that Macintosh, Unix, and Windows users can collaborate on web content without all the usual conversion problems. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter whether your documents are hosted on an Apache or Microsoft IIS server.

WebDAV is software agnostic. As long as your web-authoring tools are DAV-compliant, it makes little difference which particular product you’re using.

WebDAV is (at least should be) seamless. Because DAV is simply a set of extensions to HTTP, it’s easy for companies to build support into any product that already understands the Web. And, since DAV rides on top of HTTP, firewalls tend not to get in the way of accessing your web content remotely.

WebDAV makes use of the standard authorization and authentication methods built right into every web server. In the same ...