“The Web was invented so that scientists could use computer
networks to collaborate — that is, exchange documents, discuss
them, coordinate work, create and publish collective knowledge. It
was, in other words, supposed to be a groupware application.”
“Despite the popularity of the Web — or, perhaps, because of
that popularity — it has yet to fulfill that original mission.
Today’s Web is more like a shotgun marriage of electronic
publishing and broadcast television than it is like an engineered
solution for group collaboration. True, the Internet empowers
today’s working scientist in ways only dreamed of even a decade
ago. Yet our use of it often remains rooted in pre-Web idioms and
habits — partly because we don’t fully exploit today’s Internet
communication tools, but mainly because we’re still missing key
tools and infrastructure….”
“Although HTML is a far simpler markup language than, say, TeX,
today’s Web is biased heavily toward consuming content, and offers
little support for producing it. The Web, in its current
incarnation, is a library in which we read, not a bulletin board on
which we scribble. The Internet application that we do use for
scribbling — endlessly, prolifically — is email. But while email
can (and often does) become Web content, it’s never first-class Web
content.”
“Lately there is movement on a number of fronts to reclaim
the two-way, read/write architecture that was the Web’s original
conception. Part of the story is a new protocol called WebDAV
(Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning,
http://www.webdav.org/, also known simply as DAV), which enables
client applications to store documents directly on a DAV-aware Web
server, lock and unlock the documents, and query or set their
properties. DAV-aware servers include Apache (with the mod_dav
module), Microsoft’s Internet Information Server version 5, and
Digital Creations’ Zope. DAV-aware clients include the Microsoft
Office apps and, more recently, Adobe’s Go Live, a Web authoring
and content-management tool.”