WebFund 2024F Lecture 1

Video

Video from the lecture given on September 5, 2024 is now available:

• video
• auto-generated captions

Notes

Fundamentals of Web Applications - Fall 2024
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What is the web?
 - the web is not the Internet
 - Internet started in the early 1970's
 - the web is from the early 1990's

The Internet was created to allow computers to be shared
 - computers were very expensive
 - justification: sharing would reduce costs

The world wide web was just an application running on the Internet
 - for creating hypertext, i.e., linked documents
 - for sharing information (i.e., between scientists)

Not the first hypertext system
 - Memex
 - Xanadu
 - Gopher, WAIS

Big enabler of the rise of the web - PC's got powerful enough to join the Internet
 - could run UNIX-like operating systems (modern OSs)
 - important because you need to do networking and UI at the same time

Needed because for the web to take off, it had to be easy to create web servers!

Before the web, the Internet was largely "academic"
(companies were on it, but wasn't really used for business except email)

The web made the Internet interesting to the general population
 - easy to use!

Remember that there were easy-to-use online systems, but they were commercial
 - CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL
 - had proprietary hypertext systems
 - some had e-commerce
 - also BBSs

The web has to be understood as an evolved system
 - pieces were designed, but the whole grew organically
 - means that there are lots of...rough spots

The web is all about compatibility
 - so things can be accessed anywhere
 - old stuff still works

So mistakes of the past in general can't be fixed
 - but there are exceptions

HTTP - hypertext transfer protocol
 - requests & responses
 - as part of each request, there are key/value pairs containing various bits of info
    - requested language, etc
 - one field contains the page that sent us to this request
   - known as "Referer"

Be aware of this, try to accept it rather than get frustrated (then you'll just be frustrated with web apps forever)

But some things are weird for good reason
 - for example, why can't you precisely control the layout of a web page?!
    - because the web was designed to adapt to different
      screen sizes and different web browsers,
      potentially ones that accommodate differently-abled
      individuals
 - but people fight against this, and so we get lots of pages that are not accessible, break on different screens, but still aren't pixel-perfect