LIS 7008 - Information Technologies
Summer 2009 - Section 02
Assignment 6


This homework is due on your course Web site before 7:00PM June 29 Monday. Partial credit may be awarded. It is very difficult to teach and learn programming online, and if you do not have any previous programming experience, it may take you long time to learn and you may feel frustrated. So we have a special grading policy for this assignment. If your program works, you earn 100 points; if it partially works, you may earn a grade between 90-95; if you have done some work but it does not work at all, do not sweat, I will take a look at your program and assign a grade between 80-89. If you do nothing, that is 0, but it would be appreciated if you could tell me that you did not do anything because it takes time for me to figure out what you have done. The purpose of the assignment is to give you the opportunity to learn how JavaScript can be used to create an interactive Web page, not to train you to be a good JavaScript programmer. If you are serious about being a Web designer, you are advised to take LIS 7510 Website Design and Management, in which Dr. Ju will teach you a whole lot of JavaScript. It is not realistic to train a social scientist or a humanity scholar to be a JavaScript programmer in one online class session if she/he has no previous programming experience.

Explanation

The JavaScript program that we looked at in the lecture notes (i.e., selector.html) is a good start, but a real search tool selector would probably need to provide more options and do more sophisticated selection. It is therefore important that you learn how to modify JavaScript that you find on the Web to suit your purposes. In this assignment, you will modify selector.html in two ways, and post your modified page in your WAM account for the instructor to grade.

If you have not download the page, please do so here: shorthand version or full version (with semicolons and complete braces)

Modify the Program

The library board has decided that people aged 16 and over should be treated as adults by the search tool selector. Change your copy of the page to implement this new policy.

Your library director has learned that a recent report published in the Journal of Internet Stuff has revealed that people over 40 prefer the AltaVista search engine (http://www.altavista.com), but that adults aged 40 and under prefer Google (www.google.com). Change your copy of the page to send adults to the search engine that they are most likely to like based on their age (if they select a search engine).

Save your work as hw6.html (or whatever filename you like), then link this from your 7008.html Web page, which must be accessible from http://slis.lsu.edu/faculty/wu/7008/su09/YOUR_FOLDER/7008.html (where where YOUR_FOLDER is your your last name followed by your first initial, all in lower case, but probably not case-sensitive).


Acknowledgement to Doug Oard, slightly revised by Yejun Wu.