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The evolution of the World Wide Web has seen an explosion of data communication technologies, protocols, and standards such as XML, DTDs, XML Schema, XPath, XSLT, DOM, SAX, RDF, OWL, … . In this course we decipher this alphabet soup of web technologies. The global goal is to obtain both a fundamental insight into the formal theory behind these technologies as well working knowledge of how they are used in practice.
The main course objectives and developed competences, as well as the examination modalities are summarized in the course plan (general course information document).
In this first lecture (slides) we have (1) overviewed the content and objectives of the course and (2) discussed the history of the Web and its overall architecture (URIs, resources, representations). In particular we have looked at the working of the HTTP protocol and gave a very brief overview of HTML and CSS.
Required reading:
Lecture 2 has introduced XML and XPath in depth.
Required reading:
Lecture 3 has introduced (1) the motivation behind XML Schema Languages, (2) syntax and semantics of DTDs, and (3) regular expressions.
See pages 92-113 in the book as well as the corresponding slides.