[simonw]

I actually think high performance web architecture could make for an excellent mind-broadening course. Consider the things you need a deep understanding of:

- DNS, how it works, DNS level load balancing, DNS client implementations in operating systems

- Internet routing architecture and CDNs

- Browser internals: how modern browsers access the network, how their parsers work, how they parallelise requests

- In-depth understanding of both JavaScript and the DOM

- How CSS style engines work

- Different image file formats

- How compression works

- How to introspect and monitor web page performance

- How to reverse-engineer complex web sites

[lightcatcher]

I agree all of these things would be good to learn in a course. I think a course that taught these things would be better structured as a course that teaches about these, and then at some point have a 15 minute talk (or a set/project) about how these concepts affect the load time for web pages and how one can make pages load faster.

There is a course at my school that's somewhat similar to this (http://courses.cms.caltech.edu/cs144/ ), but it looks at web from a very theoretical level. Out of the list you posted above, it definitely teaches about how the internet is architechted (and therefore why CDN's are a good idea). DNS is covered in a networking class, and compression (lossy and lossless) is addressed in other classes.

It seems like many of the things this Stanford course teaches are things that CS students should already know from other CS classes and they just have to figure out how to apply them. The class seems like it could be a valuable introduction to non CS majors who just want to understand how the web works so they can build some web app or something.