Difference between GET and PROPFIND in WebDAV

Question

According to WebDAV specification (RFC 4918):

The semantics of GET are unchanged when applied to a collection, since GET is defined as, "retrieve whatever information (in the form of an entity) is identified by the Request-URI" [RFC2616].

and PROPFIND

retrieves properties defined on the resource identified by the Request-URI.

So GET and PROPFIND more or less retrieve the information of a resource. In this sense, is there any major difference between GET and PROPFIND and when should one be used instead of the other.

Answer 1

The very paragraph, you refer to, explains it:

GET, when applied to a collection, may return the contents of an "index.html" resource, a human-readable view of the contents of the collection, or something else altogether.

I.e. the GET behaves as it historically did, to maintain a backward compatibility. It will typically return an "index" page (file index.html, index.php or similar) or it will automatically render an HTML page with a directory contents (a file list). This means the WebDAV server can run on the same port as HTTP server (= as an extension of the HTTP server), with the existing HTTP requests behaving the same.

While the WebDAV PROPFIND request will return an exactly defined, machine-readable, XML document, according to the WebDAV specification.

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If you are implementing a WebDAV client or server, you are interested in the PROPFIND only. A GET response does not have a defined format (not even content), so it cannot be parsed by an application.