Jess Holle wrote:
WebDAV seems to be largely an empty promise due to the lack of reasonable, compatible clients.
>>90% of all clients are Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft Windows' Web Folders support WebDAV to a *small* degree. Yet the way this is integrated into the OS is at such a level that >99% of all Windows apps are incompatible in full or part with Web Folders (e.g. you can't directly save to or open from web folders from these apps). Even Microsoft Office is only compatible with web folders in the most common menu items (e.g. open/save) whereas various other file dialogs for importing, object inclusion, etc, are not compatible with web folders. The kicker for app developers: the OS does not give you a normal file path (or File object in Java) for objects in web folders -- thus requiring special action to be compatible.
I've tried products which claim to give the level of integration that Microsoft failed to achieve. Unfortunately, they proved unstable and unreliable.
Now various UNIX flavors may well provide file system mappings to WebDAV (and the OS X one sounds nice), but unfortunately for those who produce servers that would like to be able to just expose themselves to clients via WebDAV this is essentially useless for >>90% of the market.
I absolutely disagree. Windows comes with two clients (an explorer extension and a filesystem driver),
How does the user use the filesystem driver?
The end-user certainly cannot achieve anything meaningful via web folders. I did a lot of testing in this regard.
Now if there is a better level of usability/functionality achievable with Windows without significant additional client side programming, I'd love to hear more about it -- i.e. I'd love to discover I'm simply ignorant here and find a silver bullet for this issue!
MacOSX comes with a drriver, and there's also a Linux FS.
Agreed on these counts, but these are <<10% of the market.
Many major applications (for instance Adobe or OpenOffice) support it as well. WebDAV is robust and interoperability is actually quite good.
OpenOffice is very small in terms of market share, though I certainly wish it all the best! Adobe is also fairly small in terms of market share.
What is really necessary is an across-the-board file-system and desktop GUI level integration such that all applications on the OS get some level of functionality with WebDAV (including open and save as a minimum!) and those that are "DAV-aware" may get more. App-by-app DAV awareness is *much* less interesting as it is guaranteed to be inconsistent between apps and as a server-vendor one can't depend on it being present in the client apps. I've not seen any means to achieve this across-the-board functionality with Windows (and again, *please* prove me ignorant here).
-- Jess Holle
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