Many of Wednesday's lecture periods are for general discussion on an issue related to what we are studying. The issues will be assigned here throughout the term.

Due before Wednesday's lecture each week with an issue is an issue “essay” from you. There are eight of these over the term. Each is worth 1% towards the final mark.

Each issue essay will be based on a reading, or an exploration of an issue that you are asked to do. The reason for the essays is simply a trick: to get people prepared to discuss on Wednesday.

Each essay should be fairly short and simple. An upper bound is “half a page”, or 250 words. (If you end up with 260 words or so, don't worry about it. Just don't get carried away. Also do not obsess if you are much under the limit, as long as you feel you have said what is important.) Make it readable, but do not obsess with the language. Saying something with some thought about the issue is more important. Format is not important either.

To turn in an essay, e-mail it the instructor.

• Send to "Parke Godfrey" <godfrey@cse.yorku.ca>.

• For the e-mail's subject, say

  cse-2041 / issue essay #N / cseXXXXX

where N is the current topic number, and cseXXXXX is your CSE account name.

• Format the essay either just in plain text, or in HTML, if you prefer.

Are The Internet and The Web just synonyms for the same thing, or are they different things?

The The Internet refers to the collection of connected LANs (local area networks), and the trunks and network exchanges that connect them. This also refers to the Internet Protocol Suite (stack), which describes the layers of network protocols, such as TCP/IP. In one form or another, the Internet as we know it has been around for 40 years.

The Web, or WWW, is an “application” that rides on the application layer of the Internet Protocol Stack, one of many. Its protocol is HTTP, and its standard service port assignment is port 80. The Web is twenty years old. The Web has become one of the most prominent and useful of Internet applications. It is widely used nowadays as a standard means for broadcasting information and providing interactive services.

It is common for people and journalists too to mix up the Internet and the Web, using the terms almost interchangeably. On the one hand, there is little harm in this. Why should we expect people to draw such a technical distinction? And certainly, the Web is closely related to the Internet, as it is perhaps the most prominent application on it. On the other hand, such confusion can lead to bad policies, esecially when government officials do not recognize the distinction. And it can lead to confusion and bad design when people who build and program Internet and Web applications fail to appreciate the distinction.

(233 words.)

Ever heard the quote, “the medium is the message?” That is a quote of Marshall McLuhan, who was a professor of English literature at U of T.

However, the Web separates the message (the content) from the medium (presentation). That is the point of MVC. So one might argue that, today, the medium is no longer the message.

This is what is discussed in Wired's article from November 2010, Design Is Dead: Long Live Design! (What's with Wired's fixation on X is dead anyway?!) Read that article.

For your write-up, address the following.

1. What did McLuhan mean by, “the medium is the message?”

2. Has the Web killed design when it comes to content? Or has it improved it?

3. We are used to the notion of media; e.g., magazines, newspapers, TV, movies, etc. And some of those have become “digitial”, to be sure; e.g., TV becoming HDTV. In what ways is digital media distinct from “old” media?

I know the questions above are open ended. Just make some succient observations. And remember the 250 word cap!

There is a perennial debate over whether markup or WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) is the better way to edit and produce documents.

Read Jeff Atwood's piece on 23 March 2012 from his Coding Horror blog on this: What You Can't See You Can't Get, and watch the four-minute embedded video about the Gliimpse Project.

For your write-up, address the following.

1. Name what you perceive to be a key advantage and a key disadvantage each for the markup approach and for the WYSIWIG approach.

2. State an example of a markup language and of a WYSIWIG system.

3. Which approach dominates today?

4. Is it possible to have the best of both worlds, a document system that represents a WYSIWIG interface for writing, but represents the document well in markup?

Privacy concerns have been a growing concern with the Web over the last decade. In 1999, Scott McNealy, then CEO of then Sun Microsystems, famously said, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” This past decade has only seen the debate intensify. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has declared that the age of privacy is over.

Are the privacy threats overblown or are they real? Should we care on way or the other? Is there any reasonable expectation of privacy? What are the mechanisms by which we are tracked on the Web?

Read Wired's article from August 2009, You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again.

For your write-up, address the following.

1. What are LSO's? How are they different than Web cookies?

2. In your opinion, do we have an expectation of privacy when using the Web? Should we have?

3. Name an incident of privacy and technology — besides LSO's and what is in the article! — that you have encountered recently.

As usual, some of the questions above are open ended. Again, just make some succient observations. In the debate of many privacy issues, there are no clearcut right and wrong answers. And remember the 250 word cap!

The terms “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0” are almost vacuous due to the numerous ways people have used them. When the term “Web 2.0” was initially introduced, however, it was to distinguish some distinct differences in how the Web was being used from before. One can view the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 as a sort of dividing line.

Read O'Reilly's article from September 2005, What Is Web 2.0?

For your write-up, address the following.

1. From what the article discusses, in your opinion — and in hindsight, as it is now 2012 — what is the key aspect of “Web 2.0”? compared with “Web 1.0”?

2. What does the term the long tail mean? Why does the author contend this is important to Web 2.0?

3. The article states that Wikipedia “is already in the top 100 websites” and that “many think it will be in the top ten before long.” This was written in autumn 2005. Where does Wikipedia rank today amongst websites (by traffic)?

4. The article distinguishes between the terms the dynamic web and the live web. What does the author claim the difference to be?

Again, just make some succient observations with regards to the questions. And remember the 250 word cap!

In an internal email at Google dated a year ago — leaked, with a copy hosted by github:gist — a corporate strategy is laid out regarding the evolution of Web programming, and the future of JavaScript. The email promotes a high risk / high reward strategy to develop a new language, Dash, for web-application, client-side programming, that would ultimately replace JavaScript in that role.

Indeed, Google has since pursued the courses of action outlined in that email. Dash has been renamed Dart in the interim. Dart was debued at Goto! in September 2011, and a toolkit for it released this autumn.

1. In what ways does Mr. Miller feel JavaScript is inadequate?

2. With which platforms does Mr. Miller feel the “web platform” needs to compete?

3. Will Google continue to support JavaScript?

4. What are the potential advantages and disadvantages of Google's Dart strategy for the web community?

It is easy in hindsight to understand what came about. But it is much, much harder to anticipate what is coming. What will be the next big thing on the Internet? The world of the Internet, the web, webapps, and the current hot companies is bound to look profoundly different in just five years. Where you will work — and what you will work on — are things we might not even be able to anticipate today.

Watch Roger McNamee: Six ways to save the internet at TED.

1. What are McNamee's six observations?

1. Which of the six do you agree most with (if any), and why?

2. Which of the six do you disagree most with (if any), and why?

2. What does he say is, and is not, important on mobile?

3. Make a prediction of your own how the Internet, the Web, and how we use them will change in the next five years.