4 ms·

I remember playing with WebDAV in the early 2000s. Microsoft Windows and/or Office and/or Sharepoint Client had (two!) implementations which supposedly would be

by 0x0 8y ago

I remember playing with WebDAV in the early 2000s. Microsoft Windows and/or Office and/or Sharepoint Client had (two!) implementations which supposedly would be able to present a WebDAV share as something that would look and behave more or less like a mapped drive, which would have been a killer feature for anyone developing an online file/document/collaboration service. (For example, imagine exposing your web CMS media library or even page structure as a mounted drive via HTTP). This was long before FUSE was a thing. Unfortunately, the amount of crazy bugs combined with the unnatural and surprising behavior of Microsoft's two(!) implementations (which one got used depended on which part of the UI the user came in through) made the whole thing a flaky disappointing flop. Also, the whole XML protocol feels totally over-engineered and overly verbose. See for example: https://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webfolder-client-list.html https://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webfolder-client-list.... https://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webdav-redirector-list.html https://www.greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/webdav-redirector-list...

ronsor 8y ago
Almost anything XML is over-engineered. It's sad because WebDAV is cool and useful as a "public http drive", and better than FTP as far as reliability.
- jonas21 8y ago
  > Almost anything XML is over-engineered. I hear this a lot, but I feel that with many XML protocols (including WebDAV), if you reformatted them as JSON, people today would think they were pretty reasonable. XML was just the popular style back in the 90s / early 2000s.
  - unilynx 8y ago
    And it surely beat the other common alternatives at the time for directory listings: raw /bin/ls like formats for FTP or a HTML dirindex for HTTP
    - 0x0 8y ago
      Did it though? At least microsoft usually managed to parse ftp and html dirindexes. The bugs they had in their webdav clients (see link in parent post) was something else... incorrect/lacking xml entity handling that almost indicates substr'ing for "&" instead of using a real parser, and converting percent-escaped utf8 to percent-escaped latin1..?! You almost have to try to sabotage on purpose to get bugs like these.
  - xkcd-sucks 8y ago
    The XML spec is just so complicated, with tag attributes, xsd, dtd, etc. Although it has nice capabilities, it can be tricky to map some random person's xml document to another data structure. But JSON seems like the pendulum just swung to its opposite apex

by 0x0 8y ago

ronsor 8y ago

Almost anything XML is over-engineered. It's sad because WebDAV is cool and useful as a "public http drive", and better than FTP as far as reliability.

jonas21 8y ago
> Almost anything XML is over-engineered. I hear this a lot, but I feel that with many XML protocols (including WebDAV), if you reformatted them as JSON, people today would think they were pretty reasonable. XML was just the popular style back in the 90s / early 2000s.
- unilynx 8y ago
  And it surely beat the other common alternatives at the time for directory listings: raw /bin/ls like formats for FTP or a HTML dirindex for HTTP
  - 0x0 8y ago
    Did it though? At least microsoft usually managed to parse ftp and html dirindexes. The bugs they had in their webdav clients (see link in parent post) was something else... incorrect/lacking xml entity handling that almost indicates substr'ing for "&" instead of using a real parser, and converting percent-escaped utf8 to percent-escaped latin1..?! You almost have to try to sabotage on purpose to get bugs like these.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  The XML spec is just so complicated, with tag attributes, xsd, dtd, etc. Although it has nice capabilities, it can be tricky to map some random person's xml document to another data structure. But JSON seems like the pendulum just swung to its opposite apex