There is nothing worse when setting up a website than having to build some complicated method of viewing and updating the information on the site. There are lots of solutions — using a local copy, using a combination of HTTP and FTP tools to download the original and upload the changes and of course the full-blown dynamic/content managed system that provides that nice cuddly front end for you to enter the information into.In order to simplify the way you update websites, WebDAV was invented. Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) uses extensions to the existing HTTP protocol to enable multiple users to manage and modify the files in a remote system. Using suitably enabled clients you can view, open, edit and save files directly into the filesystem of the Web site as it were of a remote website.There are some obvious immediate benefits of this, not least of which the ability to edit the website without jumping through too many hoops, but it’s the inventive use of the technology beyond editing a remote website that has lead to a recent explosion in interest of WebDAV. Nowhere is this explosion more prevalent than in the Mac OS X arena, where the iCal calendar application, provided free by Apple, can publish calendars to a WebDAV server so that other users can subscribe to the calendars and find out what you’re doing. Read on for the full article.