This working group will define extensions to HTTP and the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol necessary to enable distributed Web authoring tools to perform, in an interoperable manner, versioning and configuration management of Web resources. Versioning, parallel development, and configuration management are important features for remote authoring of Web content. Version management is concerned with tracking and accessing the history of important states of a single Web resource, such as a stand alone Web page. Parallel development provides additional resource availability in multi-user, distributed environments, allowing authors the choice of making independent changes on the same resource at the same time, later merging together those changes. Configuration management addresses the problems of tracking and accessing multiple interrelated resources over time as sets of resources, not simply individual resources. Traditionally, artifacts of software development, including code, design, test cases, requirements, help files, and more have been a focus of configuration management. Web sites, comprised of multiple inter-linked resources (HTML, graphics, sound, CGI, and others), are another important class of complex information artifacts that benefit from the application of configuration management. The WebDAV working group originally focused on defining version management capabilities for remote authoring applications. However, it has become clear that while versioning functionality alone is useful for a range of content authoring scenarios involving one, or a small set of resources, versioning alone is insufficient for managing larger sets of content. Support for parallel development and simple remote configuration management of Web resources provides needed functionality for managing larger sets of interrelated content developed by multiple users at different locations. A standard protocol for accesing such services will ensure interoperability between many clients and many servers. A sub-group of the WebDAV working group has developed functional requirements for versioning and configuration management of Web content. These requirements encompass the following capabilities, which shall be considered by this working group: IN-SCOPE: - Naming and accessing resource versions and configurations - Creating new revisions of a resource - Placing a resource under version and configuration control - Parallel development - History retrieval - Differencing - Merging of revisions and configurations - Operations on configurations - Mapping resource versions and configurations to the URL namespace - Versioning support for downlevel HTTP and WebDAV clients Further information on these objectives can be found in the document, "Goals for Web Versioning". NOT IN SCOPE: HTTP server to server communication protocols Development process management, workflow, or change request management Versioning and configuration management via non-HTTP and WebDAV protocols. Implementation of functionality by non-origin proxies Deliverables The following documents are expected to form the final output of this working group. 1. A goals document, which describes the high-level functional requirements for remote versioning and configuration management, including rationale. 2. A protocol specification, which describes new HTTP methods, headers, request bodies, response bodies, and WebDAV properties to implement the remote versioning and configuration management goals.