The big problem I have with WebDAV is that the specs for very pieces all do kind of "vertical" slices of functionality without separation of concerns between low-level protocol (what does HTTP provide and what is it missing, and how do we generically extend it to provide what is necessary for the applications we are trying to do) and content semantics, so that where it extended the HTTP protocol (with new methods, etc.), those extensions were tightly bound to content semantics.
I think rethinking the same problem domain with a more RESTful approach, a lot better could be done, with a lot simpler set of generic protocol extensions covering the few real gaps in HTTP/1.1 and a simple set of metadata content types [0] to cover authoring/versioning information, with primary content just using any content type.
[0] And, really, this is two problems that should be addressed somewhat separately, in terms of representation-neutral metadata content models first, and then in terms of various representations for those content models.
I think rethinking the same problem domain with a more RESTful approach, a lot better could be done, with a lot simpler set of generic protocol extensions covering the few real gaps in HTTP/1.1 and a simple set of metadata content types [0] to cover authoring/versioning information, with primary content just using any content type.
[0] And, really, this is two problems that should be addressed somewhat separately, in terms of representation-neutral metadata content models first, and then in terms of various representations for those content models.