J. Blustein

CS4173 > Course > Goals and Topics

Web-centric Computing

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Course Goals and Topics

These goals and topics were jointly produced by Profs. N. Zincir-Heywood and J. Blustein.

Changes noted below* (for Winter 2007) are for that year only, and were made by Professor J. Blustein alone.

Goals

Successful students will have a solid grasp of core WWW technologies and a conceptual framework for understanding the development of the WWW and working with future web technologies. The objective will be attained by:

• Providing students with an understanding of how the separate parts of the WWW (logical structure, content, presentation) are combined to render documents for human and machine use;
• Exploring views of the WWW (as a tool enabling commerce, as a tool for collaborative writing and community building, as a distributed document delivery service);
• Giving an understanding of how medium-size interactive client-server web applications can be built using different types of Web technologies (including multi-level caches and proxies);
• Exploring the significance of web design and programming concepts in terms of accessibility issues both from the perspective of the web robots, and end-users;
• Discussing security issues and strategies in a web-based application.

Course Topics

The following topics will be examined:

1. Review of Client/Server Architectures
2. Background to the World Wide Web (WWW)
   1. Historical development of the WWW
   2. Goals of the WWW pioneers and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
   3. Concept of hypertext
   4. Review of HTML and XHTML
   5. Some advanced aspects of XHTML
3. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Web Servers
   1. HTTP requests and request methods
   2. HTTP response
   3. HTTP headers
4. Accessibility of web sites
   1. Audience of the web site
      1. People in general
      2. Types of human clients
      3. Crawlers
   2. Good design issues
      1. Describing information
      2. Finding information
   3. Stickiness
   4. Accessibility issues
   5. Tools for accessibility checking
5. Client Side Programming/Dynamic HTML (DHTML)
   1. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
   2. W3C's Domain Object Model (DOM)
   3. JavaScript
   4. Java Applets*
6. Server Side Programming
   1. Databases and Web servers
   2. Forms and XForms
   3. Stateless Web
      1. Cookies
      2. Session Management
7. Caching and mirroring
   1. Proxies
   2. Caches
   3. Mirrors
8. Content-based applications
   1. Metadata
      1. Dublin Core
      2. Semantic Web
      3. Resource Description Framework
      4. link and meta elements
   2. Filtering
      1. Meta tags
      2. PICS rules
      3. Whitelists and blacklists
9. Security issues and strategies*
10. Future directions*
    1. Using XML and XSL to re-target documents
    2. Examination of current W3C draft proposals

*Winter 2007 Topics

For the Winter 2007 term only, the following changes were made:

• There was no discussion or lectures about Java Applets.
• The discussion of security and privacy issues was abridged, and there was no formal lecture in which the terms were defined. P3P, Cookies, and authentication were thoroughly covered.
• The Future Directions were: Web Services, Ajax, and Ruby on Rails.

See Also

• Lists of reference books, examples, and lectures
• Brief summaries of selected topics
• Topic list for Summer 2001

http://www.cs.dal.ca/~jamie/course/CS/4173/Course/goals/topics.html

Version:

20 March 2007

CS 4173 Prof.:

J. Blustein <jamie@cs.dal.ca>

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