1.3 Overview

  • Article

The WebDAV Protocol is a set of methods, headers, and content-types that extend the Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1, as specified in [RFC2616]. The WebDAV Protocol allows data to be written to Internet servers and is an Internet standard for collaborative authoring, as specified in [RFC4918].

The WebDAV Protocol expands the basic support in HTTP/1.1 for content authoring by introducing additional methods and headers that provide support for resource properties and other base functions, such as resource locking. These new capabilities make the WebDAV Protocol suitable for basic remotely mountable file systems.

WebDAV Protocol: Client Extensions specifies the following extensions to the base WebDAV Protocol:

  • A mechanism, which is based on the WebDAV Protocol and HTTP/1.1, to indicate support for the extensions that are covered in this document.

  • A header to indicate if an entity is to be returned as is or if any associated programmatic processing is to be performed and the result returned.

  • An extension that provides a way to GET and PUT properties along with entity content, offering more efficient file browsing.

  • A header that enables the bundling of locking information by using GET, PUT, and POST commands to improve the efficiency of locking semantics.

WebDAV Protocol: Client Extensions also specifies the following extension to the base HTTP protocol:

  • A mechanism for an HTTP request to be retried using the HTTP 449 status code extension.