Requirements for distributed authoring and versioning on the World Wide Web

Abstract

Current World Wide Web (WWW or Web) standards provide simplesupport for applications which allow remote editing of typed data. Inpractice, the existing capabilities of the WWW have proven inadequate tosupport efficient, scalable remote editing free of overwritingconflicts. This document presents a list of features in the form ofrequirements for a Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning protocolwhich, if implemented, would improve the efficiency of common remoteediting operations, provide a locking mechanism to prevent overwriteconflicts, improve link management support between non-HTML data types,provide a simple attribute-value metadata facility, provide for thecreation and reading of container data types, and integrate versioninginto the WWW.