Network Working Group                                        Y. Goland
Request for Comments: 2518                                   Microsoft
Category: Standards Track                                 E. Whitehead
                                                             UC Irvine
                                                              A. Faizi
                                                              Netscape
                                                             S. Carter
                                                                Novell
                                                             D. Jensen
                                                                Novell
                                                         February 1999


          HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring -- WEBDAV

Status of this Memo

   This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
   Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
   improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
   Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
   and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   This document specifies a set of methods, headers, and content-types
   ancillary to HTTP/1.1 for the management of resource properties,
   creation and management of resource collections, namespace
   manipulation, and resource locking (collision avoidance).

Table of Contents

   ABSTRACT............................................................1
   1 INTRODUCTION .....................................................5
   2 NOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS ...........................................7
   3 TERMINOLOGY ......................................................7
   4 DATA MODEL FOR RESOURCE PROPERTIES ...............................8
   4.1  The Resource Property Model ...................................8
   4.2  Existing Metadata Proposals ...................................8
   4.3  Properties and HTTP Headers ...................................9
   4.4  Property Values ...............................................9
   4.5  Property Names ...............................................10
   4.6  Media Independent Links ......................................10
   5 COLLECTIONS OF WEB RESOURCES ....................................11



Goland, et al.              Standards Track                     [Page 1]

RFC 2518                         WEBDAV                    February 1999


   5.1  HTTP URL Namespace Model .....................................11
   5.2  Collection Resources .........................................11
   5.3  Creation and Retrieval of Collection Resources ...............12
   5.4  Source Resources and Output Resources ........................13
   6 LOCKING .........................................................14
   6.1  Exclusive Vs. Shared Locks ...................................14
   6.2  Required Support .............................................16
   6.3  Lock Tokens ..................................................16
   6.4  opaquelocktoken Lock Token URI Scheme ........................16
    6.4.1  Node Field Generation Without the IEEE 802 Address ........17
   6.5  Lock Capability Discovery ....................................19
   6.6  Active Lock Discovery ........................................19
   6.7  Usage Considerations .........................................19
   7 WRITE LOCK ......................................................20
   7.1  Methods Restricted by Write Locks ............................20
   7.2  Write Locks and Lock Tokens ..................................20
   7.3  Write Locks and Properties ...................................20
   7.4  Write Locks and Null Resources ...............................21
   7.5  Write Locks and Collections ..................................21
   7.6  Write Locks and the If Request Header ........................22
    7.6.1  Example - Write Lock ......................................22
   7.7  Write Locks and COPY/MOVE ....................................23
   7.8  Refreshing Write Locks .......................................23
   8 HTTP METHODS FOR DISTRIBUTED AUTHORING ..........................23
   8.1  PROPFIND .....................................................24
    8.1.1  Example - Retrieving Named Properties .....................25
    8.1.2  Example - Using allprop to Retrieve All Properties ........26
    8.1.3  Example - Using propname to Retrieve all Property Names ...29
   8.2  PROPPATCH ....................................................31
    8.2.1  Status Codes for use with 207 (Multi-Status) ..............