Platform or Foundational Concept? Approaches to Teaching Modern Web Development

The early web was built on static HTML or pages generated dynamically by the server. In both paradigms, the combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was considered a specific platform rather than a core CS concept. In recent years, the nature of web development has shifted dramatically, emphasizing web applications that limit their dependency on server-side processing. Much of the content generation is handled in response to asynchronous execution of JavaScript. JavaScript is no longer just a language for writing event handlers; it now forms the core of client-side web development. This code must interact dynamically and asynchronously with complex backend processing systems. As such, modern web development is not as straightforward as using a server-side language to generate HTML text dynamically. It requires addressing a new computational paradigm, while also placing a greater emphasis on the user experience and accessibility. In our classes, we have observed the need to rethink how this part of our curriculum is structured. A one-semester course is no longer sufficient. We have also begun starting with JavaScript and the DOM as the native language of the web. In this birds-of-a-feather (BoF) session, we will exchange ideas on how this part of the curriculum is structured and how others approach teaching these courses.