Subject: New WebDAV client spotted at XML '99

From: "David M. Chandler" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 11:40:48 -0800

A Brief Report on WebDAV at XML '99

Greg Stein's presentation on WebDAV drew a fair amount of interest, but
there was little mention of WebDAV otherwise. I was pleased to find one XML
editor with WebDAV support (below) and attempted to bring WebDAV to the
attention of other vendors. My particular interest is using a WebDAV
repository to enable collaboration on hierarchical XML documents, and I was
pleased to find a product which does exactly that.

Excosoft Documentor is a combination XML/SGML/HTML browser/editor with
WebDAV support. The most interesting aspects of the product are

1) It lets you edit in place while browsing. If a WebDAV server is
available, you can lock, modify, unlock, and save files easily.

2) When you click on a hyperlink, the browser/editor displays the target
file in-line with the file you're already browsing. Thus, a single
"document" may actually be composed of many files, each of which may locked,
modified, unlocked, and saved to the WebDAV server in place. This lends
itself easily to creating structured documents made up of hierarchical
elements. You can browse a document thus constructed in its entirety, or by
drilling down through the collapsible outline of hyperlinks. This enables
applications where many people edit different sections of the same document
at once without losing the visual context of the larger document.

It's more easily seen than described, as the interface solves a difficult
problem in a very clever way. You can download a 30-day evaluation at
www.excosoft.com.

Excosoft Documentor should also be added to the product list at webdav.org.

David Chandler
Web Applications Developer
Technisource, Inc.