    <sect1 id="features">
      <title>Feature list</title>

      <para>The major features of the neon library are as follows:</para>

      <itemizedlist>

	<listitem><para>A high-level interface to common HTTP and WebDAV
methods.  This allows you to easily dispatch a GET or a MKCOL request
against a resource with a single function call.</para></listitem>

	<listitem><para>A low-level interface for HTTP request
handling; allowing you to implement requests using arbitrary methods
and request headers, capture arbitrary response headers, and so
on.</para></listitem>

	<listitem><para>Persistent connection support; neon groups a
set of requests to a server into a "session"; requests within that
session can use a persistent (also known as "keep-alive")
connection.</para></listitem>

	<listitem><para>Modern HTTP authentication support: a complete
implementation of the new authentication standard, RFC2617, supporting
the Digest, Basic, and Negotiate protocols.  Credentials are supplied
by an application-defined callback as appropriate.</para></listitem>

	<listitem><para>Proxy server support; a session can be set to
use a proxy server.  Authentication is supported for the Proxy as well
as the origin server.  The system's proxy configuration can be
optionally used, on some platforms.</para></listitem>

	<listitem><para>Complete SSL support; a simple interface for
enabling SSL, hiding the complexity of using an SSL library directly.
Client certificate support, callback-based server certificate
verification, along with functions to load trusted CA certificates.
Smartcard-based client certs are also supported via a wrapper
interface for PKCS#11 modules.</para></listitem>

	<listitem><para>Compressed response support: responses
	compressed using the "deflate" algorithm can be transparently
	decompressed.</para></listitem>

	<listitem><para>Generic XML parsing interface for handling XML
response bodies using SAX-like callbacks.  Both the expat and libxml
XML parser libraries are supported.</para></listitem>

	<listitem><para>WebDAV metadata support; set and remove
properties, query properties (PROPFIND); simple interface for
retrieving "flat" byte-string properties, more advanced support for
parsing "complex" structured XML properties.</para></listitem>

<!--
	<listitem><para>WebDAV locking support</para></listitem>
-->

	<listitem><para>Build environment support: the neon source
tree is designed so that it can be embedded in your application's
build tree; autoconf macros are supplied for integration.  To get
started quickly a <xref linkend="refconfig"/> script is included,
to easily determine how to compile and link against an installed copy
of neon</para></listitem>

	<listitem><para>Complete test suite: the neon test suite
comprises half as many lines of source code as the library itself,
including many tests for protocol compliance in network behaviour, and
that the library implementation meets the guarantees made by the
API.</para> </listitem>

<!-- 

	<listitem><para>Thorough documentation: neon documentation is
provided in HTML and man page formats (from a single DocBook XML
source)</para></listitem>

-->

      </itemizedlist>
	
    </sect1>
