Extended Exercise: Making Web Pages

A Supplement to “How to Design Programs”

©2003 Felleisen, Findler, Flatt, Krishnamurthi

1  My First Web Page

TEACHPACK: webpages.scm

Figure 1 shows how to use DrScheme to produce Web pages in a simplistic manner. The special (green) box is a so-called XML box. Create it via the “special” menu in DrScheme.

File: web1.ss Figure 1:  My first Web page

Unlike a Web page editing tool, DrScheme requires programmers to type in plain HTML, the programming language of the Web. The figure shows how to produce a trivial page. It’s a lot of work. So the question is why should we bother with this when there are much easier ways to produce HTML pages.

This brief essay on Web pages from DrScheme explains why people want to create Web pages with programs with a specific example.

Exercise 1.0.1.   The XML boxes are just convenient short-hands for Scheme values, specifically a subset of S-expressions. Load web1.ss into DrScheme, add the teachpack, click execute, and find out what these values look like.