By Mark Wilcox, Campus Web Administrator

Web Publishing: It's About to Get Easier

There's a new protocol that is destined to take the Web to yet another level.¹ In just a short 5 years (yes It's only been 5 years) the Web has transformed computing in ways most people never dreamed was possible. While I still believe E-mail is the "killer app" because people love to talk to each other. The Web is a close second, though, because people like to talk about themselves almost as much as they like to talk to each other. Internet E-mail was around a long time before the Web, but people didn't start to use E-mail that much until the advent of Web. I don't think it's any coincidence that free PCs didn't appear until everyone started to get on the Internet to send E-mail and look at Web pages either.

Official Communications

We're starting to take another evolutionary step even here at UNT. This fall we will test out whether or not we can use the Internet (e.g. E-mail) as an official communications mechanism for students.² And that's only the start.

While we've done a fairly impressive job in providing content on the Web (both official documents and personal pages) we know we are just starting. And until it becomes as easy as typing up a paper in Microsoft Word and saving it to your local hard-drive, it really won't reach its full potential (while it's true you can save your documents to a networked drive that then is loaded by a Web server, this doesn't work when you're at home or in another part of the world ;). In particular when it comes to official documents.

This is because it takes too much time to create a document in one format and then have to translate it with a Web development tool. Most of our documents are now created in something like MS Word and don't need a bunch of fancy graphics. They just need to be available. Even as easy as Microsoft FrontPage is to use (FrontPage is our primary departmental Web development tool), it's still extra work.

The best thing about FrontPage? Its ability to save Web pages to a remote server, as if the server is local. That and the fact you can make forms in a couple of mouse clicks ;). But FrontPage isn't for everyone. I know that. We all know that, but your only other option to publishing a Web site is to use FTP. Yuk. I don't mind FTP, but then I'm the Webmaster. For most people, FTP is a scary concept. It's not very simple to use when you only need to use it every once and a while.

WebDAV to the Rescue

Luckily there's hope. A bunch of companies including Microsoft, Novell, and Netscape have gotten together to develop an extension to HTTP (the protocol we use when we're on the Web) to develop a common Web authoring mechanism. It's called WebDAV, which stands for Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning.

WebDAV is designed to enable people to publish Web pages in collaboration with others. Those others may be in the office next door, in the next building, or in a different country. The versioning part of the WebDAV name means that you can save several drafts of a document and revert back to one of those drafts if the most recent changes are un-acceptable.

WebDAV is designed to be more efficient than FTP because HTTP 1.1 enables you to use a single Internet connection to send multiple files, while FTP requires a different network connection for each item. WebDAV can also transfer only the bits that change between two documents, which further reduces network traffic. That in turn improves performance and reduces network congestion. Because HTTP can use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for improved security, it's more secure than FTP. Finally -- well that's not all, but it's probably the most important part -- WebDAV has the support of all of the major Internet companies.

Office 2000 (actually all you need is IE5) supports the concept of Web Folders. Web Folders support either FrontPage Server Extensions or WebDAV. Web Folders connect to your Windows Explorer and enable you to save files to a folder on your PC that actually transfers those files to the remote server. You can even do full file management operations like create/rename/move/delete folders and files. Even Novell's GroupWise will take advantage of WebDAV with it's new Web publishing features.

What does that mean for us at UNT?

Well I hope to be able to offer WebDAV functionality to students at some point in the fall on people.unt.edu and to faculty/staff as well for their course/departmental sites during a similar time frame. Since we already have good FrontPage support for faculty/staff, though, I'm doing my best to get this done for students more quickly.

Now if being one of the first universities to offer WebDAV support to its student population doesn't land us in the Yahoo Most Wired Universities list, I'm not sure what will. :) ³

Until next time.

Mark

¹ A protocol is a fancy term to mean the "rules" computers follow to talk to each other.

² For more information on this topic see the May 1999 article Campus Computing News.

³ UNT was named one of America's 100 most wired colleges in 1998, but lost the distinction in 1999.