It is a fact universally acknowledged that any new momentum gathering idea will be in need of a standard. Such is the conclusion one draws from a discussion on Tim Bray's ongoing of a thread on intertwingly on Yet Another Protocol. This time, publishing to the web is being reinvented. My question: what is wrong with WebDAV? It's there, it does sorta what is wanted, it's metadata savvy and extensible. It does what it dows well - with enough versioning that the Apache project is basing the new subversion versioning tool on it.
Through the apache project is is universally available as open source on almost any toaster.

Why it a new thing really required?