1. Introduction

This document describes an extension to the HTTP/1.1 protocol that allows clients to perform remote Web content authoring operations. This extension provides a coherent set of methods, headers, request entity body formats, and response entity body formats that provide operations for:

Properties: The ability to create, remove, and query information about Web pages, such as their authors, creation dates, etc.

Collections: The ability to create sets of documents and to retrieve a hierarchical membership listing (like a directory listing in a file system).

Locking: The ability to keep more than one person from working on a document at the same time. This prevents the "lost update problem", in which modifications are lost as first one author, then another, writes changes without merging the other author's changes.

Namespace Operations: The ability to instruct the server to copy and move Web resources, operations that change the mapping from URLs to resources.

Requirements and rationale for these operations are described in a companion document, "Requirements for a Distributed Authoring and Versioning Protocol for the World Wide Web" [RFC2291].

This document does not specify the versioning operations suggested by [RFC2291]. That work was done in a separate document, "Versioning Extensions to WebDAV" [RFC3253].

The sections below provide a detailed introduction to various WebDAV abstractions: resource properties (Section 4), collections of resources (Section 5), locks (Section 6) in general, and write locks (Section 7) specifically.

These abstractions are manipulated by the WebDAV-specific HTTP methods (Section 9) and the extra HTTP headers (Section 10) used with WebDAV methods. General considerations for handling HTTP requests and responses in WebDAV are found in Section 8.

While the status codes provided by HTTP/1.1 are sufficient to describe most error conditions encountered by WebDAV methods, there are some errors that do not fall neatly into the existing categories. This specification defines extra status codes developed for WebDAV methods (Section 11) and describes existing HTTP status codes (Section 12) as used in WebDAV. Since some WebDAV methods may operate over many resources, the Multi-Status response (Section 13) has been introduced to return status information for multiple resources. Finally, this version of WebDAV introduces precondition and postcondition (Section 16) XML elements in error response bodies.

WebDAV uses XML ([REC-XML]) for property names and some values, and also uses XML to marshal complicated requests and responses. This specification contains DTD and text definitions of all properties (Section 15) and all other XML elements (Section 14) used in marshalling. WebDAV includes a few special rules on extending WebDAV XML marshalling in backwards-compatible ways (Section 17).

Finishing off the specification are sections on what it means for a resource to be compliant with this specification (Section 18), on internationalization support (Section 19), and on security (Section 20).