CS-081 Assignment 1
Spring 2009

The laboratory facility for the course is not set up yet, so we will use this first part of the course to develop some understanding of how the Internet and the World Wide Web works, and to practice looking at web sites from a developer’s perspective.

Read the first five articles in the Opera/Yahoo Web Standards Curriculum (don’t panic: each “article” is quite short), and answers the following questions:

1. In what year did the Internet as we know it first become operational?
2. What is the relationship between the Internet and the World Wide Web?
3. What code did Tim Berners-Lee first release to the public in 1993 while he was at CERN?
4. What is the name of the organization that Tim Berners-Lee founded at MIT in 1994?
5. Chapter 3 says, “Every request/response starts by typing a Universal Resource Locator (URL) into the address bar of your web browser, …” But there is another way to make a URL request besides typing it. What is it?
6. What are the three principle components of a URL, and how are they specified in a URL string?
7. What does DNS stand for, and what role does it play in making Internet requests?
8. What is HTTP, and how does it relate to the World Wide Web?
9. Define the following HTML terms: element, start tag, end tag, attribute, attribute name, attribute value, and element content.
10. What are the three components of a static web page, and what language is used for each?
11. Give the names of 4 different browsers.

Submit the assignment by midnight of the due date:

1. Put your answers in the body of an email message, not in an attachment.
2. Be sure to put your name in your email message!
3. The Subject line must be CS-081 Assignment 1 to avoid my spam filters.
4. Send your email to either Christopher.VickeryATqc.cuny.edu or vickeryATbabbage.cs.qc.cuny.edu — but not to both.

See the course home page for grading and late homework policies.