[Chapter 3] 3.3 The quest for a read/write Web server

3.3 The quest for a read/write Web server

The inventors of the World Wide Web were scientists who wanted a better way to collaborate with far-flung colleagues. They intended HTTP to work as a read/write protocol. Users of the Web wouldn't just consume hypertextual content, they would also contribute and aggregate it. As the Web went mainstream, though, it became more like television than groupware. The HTTP PUT method, a part of the protocol that enables browsers to upload documents and revisions, was rarely implemented in Web servers.

Despite the Web's emergence as a mass medium, there remains an intense need for something like a read/write Web server. As this book was being finished in summer 1999, a solution was in view. WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning, RFC 2518) extends HTTP/1.1 so that multiple WebDAV clients can annotate a shared document on a WebDAV server. The protocol also provides support for moving and copying collections of files. WebDAV requests and responses are expressed as XML (Extensible Markup Language) structures. Transporting XML over HTTP or HTTPS in this way is rapidly emerging as the standard Internet approach to distributed computing, and WebDAV is riding the crest of that wave.

Early WebDAV-enabled clients included MSIE 5 and Office 2000; servers include PyDAV, a Python-based WebDAV server, and mod_dav, an Apache module. What will WebDAV mean to the future of Internet-based collaboration? Prognosticators suggest that it could replace many current mechanisms including FTP for file transfer, CVS for source-code control, IMAP for server-based message management, and NNTP for conferencing. At the moment, though, nobody really knows whether, or when, or to what extent these predictions will come true. So I've chosen to focus this book on the current installed base of Internet browsers, mailreaders, and newsreaders, and to explore their still-untapped collaborative potential.

A large installed base is both a blessing and a curse, as Microsoft learned when many users demanded support for Windows 3.1 long after Microsoft had hoped they would have dumped it for Windows 95. Similarly, in the Internet realm, the inertia created by the installed base of 3.x/4.x browsers is very strong. Many of the specific techniques described in this book presume that it will remain so for a year or two at least. That said, there are also general issues and techniques here that transcend the tools I use to illustrate them. Whether it's based on NNTP or IMAP or WebDAV, a system for pooling knowledge-rich documents in an organization must still achieve critical mass, provide properly-scoped zones of privacy, support effective navigation and search, deliver rich authoring capabilities, support and encourage the use of hypertext, and integrate with messaging applications and the Web. This book shows how to meet these challenges with today's tools.

3.3.1 The HTML-aware newsreader

One such tool is the HTML-capable newsreader. When the Microsoft and Netscape newsreaders gained this capability, first in the 3.x versions and then more powerfully in the 4.x versions, local news servers suddenly became a lot more interesting. An existing HTML document posted to a local newsgroup, or a new HTML document written using the message composers included with either of these newsreaders and then posted to a local newsgroup, could behave much like a Web page. It had its own unique URL, albeit of the news:// flavor rather than the http:// flavor. It could display rich text, images, and active hyperlinks. It could even contain scripted behavior. Although not widely noticed or appreciated, the HTML-capable newsreaders could transform an NNTP server into a kind of read/write Web server. Where local newsgroups are an established medium of communication, this dramatically lowers the activation threshold that users must otherwise cross in order to publish to an intranet Web server. HTML-enriched NNTP conferencing can be, in fact, what most intranets today sorely lack: a simple, user-friendly, single-click mechanism for Web publishing.

When I began to explore the possibilities inherent in this idea, and to encourage coworkers to do so, I soon realized that I faced a challenge. Although everyone's a prolific consumer of HTML content, relatively few of us produce it. And we tend to regard what we do produce as published work for public consumption. The HTML features of the Microsoft and Netscape messaging clients invite us to use HTML not only for conventional Web publishing, but also as a means to enrich routine correspondence. Some people argue that this is a gratuitous use of HTML, and that simple ASCII text is quite sufficient for simple business communication. Perhaps so, yet we routinely send and receive richly-formatted Microsoft Word documents. Our messaging tools are now natively capable of all the same effects. What's more, they enable us to use hypertext, and to aggregate content in the same ways that the Web does.

Today relatively few people do that kind of aggregation, and they wear a "Web author" hat while they're doing it. But Web authors are only doing what we all must do when we collaborate: create and collect useful content, and arrange it effectively. The remainder of this chapter explores ways to do that in the context of HTML-enriched local newsgroups. It covers strategies for aggregating external Web content by reference and by inclusion, aggregating local or remote news content, attaching files, composing HTML messages, and using images and hyperlinks effectively.

Even the most Net-savvy users seldom exploit the full power of HTML messaging on a dedicated NNTP server. If you're an administrator, you'll find it's not enough to just turn on local newsgroups and point users at them. You'll also need to show your users what kinds of things can be done, and how to do them. Happily you can use the conferencing environment itself to deliver much of the necessary training and demonstration.

If you're a user invited to participate in local newsgroups, you can play a key role in exploring and applying the techniques I'll describe. Hypertext authoring and content aggregation are quite new skills that have yet to make their mark on ordinary business communication, and won't until we all start to exercise them routinely.


	Practical Internet Groupware By Jon Udell 1st Edition October 1999 (est.) 1-56592-537-8, Order Number: 5378 384 pages (est.), $29.95 (est.)


3.2 Conferencing and email		3.4 Aggregating Web content in newsgroups

Practical Internet Groupware

3.3 The quest for a read/write Web server

3.3.1 The HTML-aware newsreader