Reverse-Engineering Exercise
Due November 17, via e-mail.
This exercise has two purposes: first, to introduce the concept of reverse engineering, or deducing the technical structure of a code example; and second, to raise the problem of saving state in Web 2.0 documents, and one possible (though hardly ideal) solution.
Assignment
To accomplish this agenda, you'll perform a small investigative exercise based on a project I created nearly 11 years ago. This is a cybertext fiction called Reagan Library. I make no claim for the literary and aesthetic merits of the piece here (except to say that in 1999, screen resolution was lower, so the component pages may seem to have shrunk in history's hot cycle). You'll be concerned strictly with the technical design of the project.
Specifically, you have two questions to answer:
- This project contains a mechanism for recording the number of times a reader visits each of its component pages. To do this, a record must be kept of visits to a page, using a process called saving state, which was quite a neat trick in 1999, when Web pages were assumed to be generally stateless, or unable to record information without help from a server. EXPLAIN HOW "REAGAN LIBRARY" SAVES STATE.
- The project uses JavaScript (though not XML, which was largely unknown in 1998-99) to generate the text that appears on each page. EXPLAIN THIS MECHANISM in as much detail as you think appropriate.
Deliverable
Write a brief document (a page or two) containing your answers to the two questions. Save this in Word or PDF format. Title it yourLastName_revEng, with the appropriate file extension. Send the document to me by November 17 as an attachment to e-mail.
Advice
You will want to see the external JavaScript file that is referenced by most pages in the project. It's accessible here.
You may also want to know something about at least one antique and largely deprecated Web technology. Hint.
Finally, be aware that you are working with a revised version of the project (1.1). USE THE LINKS ON THIS PAGE to access the project; or go to iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/rlx. The original version, from 1999, is also available from my Web site and other sources; while it uses the same mechanism for saving state, it has some problems that might prove distracting.
I am currently debugging version 1.1. Please let me know if you find obvious problems, particularly pages that load without the panoramic movie, or panos with no active links.
If you look closely at source code for the pages, you'll discover non-standard HTML elements. I'll update these eventually.
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