Please read the following articles. The first two articles should be read before Wednesday's class. There will be a quiz during class followed by a discussion. If everybody participates in the discussion, I won't grade the quiz. The questions below will help highlight the more important details.

Articles

• Original WWW Proposal
• Formal WWW article in the ACM magazine (You will need to be logged into the GVSU library in order to access this article's full text.)
• HTTP: The protocol Every Web Developer Must Know
• Progressive Web App Video (focus on the first 8 minutes)
• Stack Overflow article about URIs, URLs and URNs

Questions

1. For whom was Tim Berners-Lee working when he came up with the idea for the WWW?
2. Describe the main problem he was trying to solve.
3. Where did he get the idea of a "web"?
4. What type of structure/solution does Berners-Lee explicitly avoid?
5. What motivates Berners-Lee to say "CERN is a model in miniature of the rest of world in a few years time. CERN meets now some problems which the rest of the world will have to face soon"?
6. "Another person must be able to find the information, sometimes without knowing what he is looking for." What does Berners-Lee mean by this? Describe a time when you have done this.
7. According to Berners-Lee, what is the main problem with using keywords to organize/find data?
8. When was the term "Hypertext" coined?
9. What kind of web page corresponds roughly to the "Personal Skills Inventory" mentioned by Berners-Lee?
10. Give an example of how modern web servers "...provide existing information in a form matching the standard interface."
11. How does Berners-Lee describe the web in the 1994 CACM article?
12. How does he describe the browsing experience?
13. List several tools that Berners-Lee envisions the Web replacing. Did it?
14. What is a "hierarchical space"?
15. Why does Berners-Lee claim that HTTP is "perhaps misnamed"?
16. What are two competitors to the WWW described in the 1994 paper?
17. List some advantages and disadvantages of these competing systems.
18. Which points from "the future" have come true? Which have not?
19. How much did the WWW grow from 1993 to 1994?
20. Is the web as easy to update as it is to read?

Updated Wednesday, 31 August 2022, 10:18 AM