Update (Jun 96): W3C is mustering resources to carry this work forward. See: WWW Distributed Authoring Working Group Home Page
These are my notes from the break-out session following the "development tools" session on developer's day.
Interoperability among distributed (i.e. client/server) web authoring tools.
We agreed this was a requirement. Either md5 auth or a combination of SSL and basic auth would suffice. But no product should restrict folks to basic auth.
Accept: text/plain (or text/x-html-ssi, or whatever NCSA made up)
Four levels of support:
level 1 is not really acceptable. Need to find out/influence the HTTP 1.1 spec with respect to Version:, Derived-From:, etc.
Creating files and directories raises some issues.
We decided this isn't a goal worth persuing. Everybody will implement their own forms-based access control model.
Again, interoperability here isn't likely.
Please label document with the DTD that your product supports, e.g.
<!doctype html system "http://www.vermeer.com/public-text/html-951224.dtd">
These could be implemented in terms of GET and POST, but since they are likely to have different access control policies, they deserve their own methods.
What about a CREATE method?
To pretty-print, or not to pretty-print. That is the question. Two issues:
Hmm... what was the issue here? I know NaviPress gets this wrong sometimes (e.g. when you save as, it doesn't fix relative links! And it goofs up images sometimes too.)
Purveyor/MS ISAPI? NSAPI? CORBA-based access control?
How to edit the french version of foo.html? Get the server to tell you it's at foo.html.fr and edit that.