Web 2.0
Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web)refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.
Darcy DiNucci originated the word in 1999, and Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty popularized it at the inaugural Web 2.0 Conference in late 2004. Although the term is similar to software version numbering, it does not denote a formal change in the nature of the World Wide Web, but rather describes a general change that occurred during this period as interactive websites proliferated and came to overshadow the older, more static websites of the original Web.
A Web 2.0 website enables users to communicate and work with one another as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community through social media discussion. This is in contrast to the previous generation of Web 1.0-era websites, when consumers were restricted to passively viewing material. Social networking or social media sites (e.g., Facebook), blogs, wikis, folksonomies (“tagging” keywords on websites and links), video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube), image sharing sites (e.g., Flickr), hosted services, Web applications (“apps”), collaborative consumption platforms, and mashup applications are examples of Web 2.0 features.
Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has questioned whether Web 2.0 is significantly different from previous Web technologies, calling the phrase jargon. His original idea of the Web was “a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all gather and read and contribute.” On the other hand, Berners-Lee developed the term Semantic Web (also known as Web 3.0) to refer to a web of material whose meaning can be interpreted by computers.
Ajax and JavaScript frameworks are client-side (Web browser) technologies used in Web 2.0 development. Ajax programming makes use of JavaScript and the Document Object Model (DOM) to update certain areas of the page without requiring a full page reload. Communications such as data requests sent to the server are separated from data returned to the page to allow users to continue engaging with the page (asynchronously).
Otherwise, the user would have to wait for the data to return before doing anything further on that page, just as they would have to wait for a page to refresh. This improves overall site speed since requests may be sent faster without the need for stopping and queueing to deliver data back to the client. An Ajax request often returns data in XML or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format, two frequently used structured data formats. Because JavaScript understands both of these formats natively, a programmer may simply utilize them to send structured data in their Web application.
When this data is received via Ajax, the JavaScript application uses the Document Object Model to dynamically alter the Web page depending on the incoming data, resulting in a more engaging and quick user experience. In brief, web designers may use these strategies to make their sites behave like desktop apps. Google Docs, for example, employs this technology to construct a Web-based word processor.
Adobe Flash, being a widely accessible plug-in that was not bound by W3C standards (the World Wide Web Consortium is the governing body of Web standards and protocols), was capable of achieving many things that were not feasible prior to HTML5. The ability to embed streaming video into HTML sites was the most often used of Flash’s various features. With the release of HTML5 in 2010 and mounting security concerns about Flash, Flash’s function became outdated, with browser support ending on December 31, 2020.
Aside from Flash and Ajax, JavaScript/Ajax frameworks have lately been a popular way to create Web 2.0 sites. These frameworks are built on the same technology as JavaScript, Ajax, and the DOM. Frameworks, on the other hand, smooth out differences across Web browsers and expand the capabilities available to developers. Many of them also include customizable, premade ‘widgets’ for simple activities like selecting a date from a calendar, showing a data chart, or creating a tabbed panel.
Web 2.0 employs much of the same server-side technology as Web 1.0. Developers employ languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby, as well as Enterprise Java (J2EE) and Microsoft.NET Framework, to generate data dynamically utilizing information from files and databases. This enables websites and online services to exchange machine-readable forms like XML (Atom, RSS, and so on) and JSON. When data is accessible in one of these formats, it can be used by another website to incorporate some of that site’s functionality.