Assignment 4. Interpreting a Specification

Due: October 28, 1:25

The purpose of this assignment is to give you practice at finding information, reading specifications and making design trade-offs. It is also intended to give you practice in writing a polished report that can be provided to a customer.

Your company provides web development services for small businesses, using the HTML markup language. You are asked to write a report that contains the following:

1. There are several versions of HTML (e.g., HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0). The standardization bodies for web technology are the Internet Engineering Task Force (www.ieft.org) and the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org). According to these bodies, what is the current version of HTML?

2. Users of web sites may use any common browser. The most widely used web browsers are Netscape Navigator (www.netscape.com) and Microsoft's Internet Explorer (www.microsoft.com). What are the current versions of these browsers? How does the version of HTML that they support match the standards?

3. Users of the web sites may have older versions of their browsers. What features of current HTML are not supported by the browsers that were current two years ago?

4. Create a list of HTML tags or features that you recommend should not be used, with your reasons for rejection. Reasons for rejection include features that are obsolete, those that are not supported by all browsers, and those that are treated differently by various browsers.

Do not spend more than 12 hours on this assignment. You will find all of the required information online. Concentrate on the core HTML markup. Do not include scripting languages, style sheets, or XML markup in your report.

Your organization intends to provide your report to potential clients. The style and presentation should do credit to your organization. Thirty percent of the grade will be given to style and presentation.

Create a directory containing the file(s) you wish us to grade. Call this directory xxxxx0, where xxxxx is your Cornell network id. Copy this directory to the following folder:

\\goose.csuglab.cornell.edu\course\cs501-fall99\assignment4

Do not be disturbed by warnings informing you that the file cannot be accessed after it has been copied. Should you wish to revise your submission after you have copied it to our folder, then simply correct the files and re-copy the entire directory---but this time use the name xxxxx1. Further revisions should be named xxxxx2, and so on. We will grade the largest-numbered file of a series.

This is an individual assignment. Everybody must submit an individual solution.

[ CS 501 Home Page ]

William Y. Arms
Last revised: October 26, 1999