We had broadly-deployed WebDAV and we threw it away.
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Friday, 07-Feb-2025 21:59:54 JST Evan Prodromou
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RobLoach (robloach@fosstodon.org)'s status on Friday, 07-Feb-2025 22:58:44 JST RobLoach
@evan WebDAV is great! Using it in a few applications. Where was it thrown away?
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Friday, 07-Feb-2025 22:58:44 JST Evan Prodromou
@RobLoach desktop OS's used to have it integrated in. MacOS, Linux, Windows.
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Friday, 07-Feb-2025 23:12:40 JST Evan Prodromou
@RobLoach and all the major storage providers supported it. One by one, they disabled it in favour of their own proprietary APIs.
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 06:32:57 JST Evan Prodromou
@RobLoach So, MacOS also lets you connect to WebDAV servers. Windows apparently doesn't anymore.
I think the problem is more on the server side; Box, OneDrive, Apple iDisk, and Amazon Cloud Drive all used to support WebDAV, but one by one they gave up on it, either because the services got cancelled or because they shifted their attention to proprietary APIs.
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RobLoach (robloach@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 06:32:58 JST RobLoach
@evan I do see File Browser integration with Linux Mint's Nemo. You can give it a WebDav URL and you can browse the server in your file browser. It's not that intuitive though, and it doesn't give you the option of mounting it locally.
WebDAV is fantastic, and I'd definitely love to see it's adoption in applications as backup/sync options. Do you think it's the user experience that blocks it?
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Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)'s status on Saturday, 08-Feb-2025 06:38:51 JST Evan Prodromou
@RobLoach When Google Drive first started, there was talk about supporting WebDAV, but it never materialized, and the third-party compatibility tools kept getting tripped up by changes in the Google Drive API.
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