For all its assets, the Web is a pretty sorry medium for sharing and revising documents. A new technical standard adopted this week by the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF, may help change that by allowing groups of users to post documents on the Web and revise them in an orderly manner.
"This will make the Web a read-and-write medium," said Jim Whitehead, a computer-science doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, and chair of the IETF working group. "Thus far, you can only read information off the Web, but now you'll be able to write it in a collaborative way."
The Distributed Authoring and Versioning, or WebDAV, standard will make it possible for Web users to efficiently write, edit, and save shared documents, so that one user's edits won't override another's. The standard will also be applied to future versions of word processors and HTML editors.
Microsoft, Netscape, Novell, IBM, Xerox, FileNet, and PC Docs helped develop the standard and have said future versions of their products will support it.
"This is all under-the-hood stuff, but what you can now do with files and folders you'll be able to do with Web documents.... It makes the Web part of your file system," said Steve Sklepowich, a product manager in Microsoft's platform-marketing division. Microsoft's Windows NT 5 server and Office 2000 products, including Word and Excel, will support the standard.
Hypothetically, a user could post a spreadsheet to a Web site and give the URL to users scattered around the world. Every time one user accessed the document from the server, it would be locked so that nobody else would access it until the first user was finished. So-called overwrite prevention is common enough in local area networks, which use common software programs and formats, but is not easily managed over the Web, where a variety of programs are in play.
The standard is an extension of the ubiquitous HTTP protocol and also employs the eXtensible markup language, allowing users to describe and embed important information, such as a document's author or its publication date.
