Web 2.0

-By V.Gouthaman

The term "Web 2.0" is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with each other as contributors to the website's content, in contrast to websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups, and folksonomies.

INTRODUCTION

The term is closely associated with Tim O'Reilly because of the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. Whether Web 2.0 is qualitatively different from prior web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who called the term a "piece of jargon" — precisely because he specifically intended the Web to embody these values in the first place.

TAXONOMY

CREATING

Generating/creating new ideas, products, or ways of viewing things (Putting together/combining ideas, concepts or elements to develop/construct/build an original idea or engage/stimulate in creative thinking).

Designing Constructing Planning Producing Inventing Devising Making Building programming, filming, animating, Blogging, Video blogging, mixing, remixing, wiki-ing, publishing, videocasting, podcasting, directing/producing

Breaking information into parts/components to explore/develop/construct understandings and relationships (Breaking information down into its component elements).

Comparing Organising Deconstructing Attributing Outlining Structuring Integrating, Mashing, linking, reverse-engineering, cracking, mind-mapping, validating

APPLYING

Using information, concepts and ideas in another familiar situation (Using strategies, concepts, principles and theories in new situations).

Implementing Carrying out Using Executing Doing, running, loading, playing, operating, hacking, uploading, sharing, editing, Wiki editing

UNDERSTANDINGExplaining/defining ideas or concepts (Understanding of given information)

Interpreting Exemplifying Summarising Inferring Paraphrasing Classifying Comparing Explaining, Advanced searches, boolean searches, blog journalling, twittering, categorising and tagging, commenting, annotating, subscribing

REMEMBERING

Recalling specific information (Recall or recognition of specific information).

Recognising Listing Describing Identifying Retrieving Naming Locating/Finding, Bullet pointing, highlighting, bookmarking, social networking, Social bookmarking, favouriting/local bookmarking, Searching, googling,

FOLKSONOMY

It Allows you to map your own path through the web by marking links with tag keywords of your choice – like the bookmarking system in browsers, or files on your PC. This means you can return to the pages you like at a later date. Tagging services such as del.icio.us let you see what others have tagged and which links are popular for certain tags. In theory, as more people bookmark more links, it should produce an online user-generated taxonomy of web content. Although there is some debate over how effective this system is, various studies have shown personal tags do have a public utility.

Folksonomies have taken on features of a network as they have developed. Communities have both adopted and been created within folksonomies. The networks created as a secondary use of folksonomies provide excellent ways to search for specialized material. Since knowledge and understanding are products of the social situation they are used it, folksonomy networks of

people who share similar interests all tag according to a shared vocabulary and meaning system. Searching within such networks should give an individual more tailored results than searches whose rankings are based on the Web as a whole

RSS

(Really Simple Syndication)

RSS (most commonly expanded as Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works - such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video - in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs.

The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed's URI or by clicking an RSS icon in a web browser

that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user

interface to monitor and read the feeds.

RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. Although RSS formats have evolved from as early as March 1999, it was between 2005 and 2006 when RSS gained widespread use, and the icon

was decided upon by several major Web browsers.

ATOM

The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub or APP) is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.

Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a website. To provide a web feed, a site owner may use specialized software (such as a content management system) that publishes a list (or "feed") of recent articles or content in a standardized, machine-readable format. The feed can then be downloaded by websites that syndicate content from the feed, or by feed reader programs that allow Internet users to subscribe to feeds and view their content.

A feed contains entries, which may be headlines, full-text articles, excerpts, summaries, and/or links to content on a website, along with various metadata.

The Atom format was developed as an alternative to RSS. Ben Trott, an advocate of the new format that became Atom, believed that RSS had limitations and flaws—such as lack of on-going innovation and its necessity to remain backward compatible— and that there were advantages to a fresh design. Proponents of the new format formed the IETF Atom Publishing Format and Protocol Workgroup.

ATOM COMPARED TO RSS 2.0

When Atom emerged as a format intended to rival or replace RSS, CNET described the motivation of its creators as follows: "Winer's opponents are seeking a new format that would clarify RSS ambiguities, consolidate its multiple versions, expand its capabilities, and fall under the auspices of a traditional standards organization.“

A brief description of some of the ways Atom 1.0 differs from RSS 2.0 has been given by Tim Bray, who played a major role in the creation of Atom.

Content model

RSS 2.0 may contain either plain text or escaped HTML as a payload, with no way to indicate which of the two is provided. Atom, on the other hand, provides a mechanism to explicitly and unambiguously label the type of content being provided by the entry, and allows for a broad variety of payload types including plain text, escaped HTML, XHTML, XML, Base64-encoded binary, and references to external content such as documents, video, audio streams, and so forth.

Date formats

The RSS 2.0 specification relies on the use of RFC 822 formatted timestamps to communicate information about when items in the feed were created and last updated. The Atom working group chose instead to use timestamps formatted according to the rules specified by RFC 3339 (which is a subset of ISO 8601).

Internationalization

While the RSS vocabulary has a mechanism to indicate a human language for the feed, there is no way to specify a language for individual items or text elements. Atom, on the other hand, uses the standard xml:lang attribute to make it possible to specify a language context for every piece of human readable content in the feed.

Atom also differs from RSS in that it supports the use of Internationalized Resource Identifiers, which allow links to resources and unique identifiers to contain characters outside the US ASCII character set.

Modularity

The elements of the RSS vocabulary are not generally reusable in other XML vocabularies. The Atom syntax was specifically designed to allow elements to be reused outside the context of an Atom feed document. For instance, it is not uncommon to find atom:link elements being used within RSS 2.0 feeds.

Example of an Atom 1.0 feed

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

<title>Example Feed</title>

<subtitle>A subtitle.</subtitle>

<link href="http://example.org/feed/" rel="self" />

<link href="http://example.org/" />

<id>urn:uuid:60a76c80-d399-11d9-b91C-0003939e0af6</id>

<updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>

<author>

<name>John Doe</name><email>[email protected]</email>

</author>

<entry><title>Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok</title><link href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03" /><link rel="alternate" type="text/html"

href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03.html"/><link rel="edit"

href="http://example.org/2003/12/13/atom03/edit"/><id>urn:uuid:1225c695-cfb8-4ebb-aaaa-80da344efa6a</id><updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated><summary>Some text.</summary>

</entry> </feed>

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed during editing appears very similar to the final output, which might be a printed document, web page, slide presentation or even the lighting for a theatrical event.

WYSIWYG implies a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the end result while the document is being created. In general WYSIWYG implies the ability to directly manipulate the layout of a document without having to type or remember names of layout commands. The actual meaning depends on the user's perspective, e.g.

In Presentation programs, Compound documents and web pages, WYSIWYG means the display precisely represents the appearance of the page displayed to the end-user, but does not necessarily reflect how the page will be printed unless the printer is specifically matched to the editing program, as it was with the Xerox Star and early versions of the Apple Macintosh.

In Word Processing and Desktop Publishing applications, WYSIWYG means the display simulates the appearance and precisely represents the effect of fonts and line breaks on the final pagination using a specific printer configuration, so that a citation on page 1 of a 500-page document can accurately refer to a reference three hundred pages later.

WYSIWYG also describes ways to manipulate 3D models in Stereochemistry, Computer-aided design, 3D computer graphics and is the brand name of Cast Software's lighting design tool used in the theatre industry for pre-visualisation of shows.

Modern software does a good job of optimizing the screen display for a particular type of output. For example, a word processor is optimized for output to a typical printer. The software often emulates the resolution of the printer in order to get as close as possible to WYSIWYG. However, that is not the main attraction of WYSIWYG, which is the ability of the user to be able to visualize what he or she is producing.

In many situations, the subtle differences between what you see and what you get are unimportant. In fact, applications may offer multiple WYSIWYG modes with different levels of "realism," including

A composition mode, in which the user sees something somewhat similar to the end result, but with additional information useful while composing, such as section breaks and non-printing characters, and uses a layout that is more conducive to composing than to layout.

A layout mode, in which the user sees something very similar to the end result, but with some additional information useful in ensuring that elements are properly aligned and spaced, such as margin lines.

A preview mode, in which the application attempts to present a representation that is as close to the final result as possible.

Applications may deliberately deviate or offer alternative composing layouts from a WYSIWYG because of overhead or the user's preference to enter commands or code directly.