Web-o-cabulary 2.0

Monday, October 22, 2007

With the augmentation of Web 2.0 technologies, a whole new technical jargon has evolved. Internet users are glutted with new terms and wonder about their meanings. So, here's a list of the 'Most Essential Vocabulary for Web 2.0' or 'Web-o-cabulary 2.0'.

AJAX: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is a scripting technique to develop interactive and fast web applications with enhanced functionality. The most commendable feature of AJAX is its ability of partial exchange of data with the server, enabling the changes to appear on the browser without reloading the complete page.

API: Application Programming Interface is a code interface over which programmers can built their own applications. APIs make it possible for the programmers to use some great features on the web without any complex coding. Some commonly used APIs include Windows Live APIs for Maps, Rich Media, Photos, Search

Atom: Atom is a commonly used syndication format for web feeds. It is based on XML and is supported by most standard feed readers.

Blog: Blog or a Weblog is an online journal, which provides an easy to use interface for users to publish content. Blogs enable people to have an online presence without having any technical knowledge.

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets is a W3C standard for defining styles of the elements on a web page. It enables the separation of content from the layout, thus providing more flexibility and control of the elements on a web page. Also, it enables layering of the content on the page.

Feeds: Feeds allow you to get updates from the websites. It allows you to check the recent articles and content from web pages on the internet. A person may subscribe to a news feed to get the latest news right on his desktop.

Folksonomy: Folksonomy is the practice of collaboratively categorizing content by tagging the content under various connotations. This method is popularly applied in social bookmarking and tagging webpages and photos.

Mashup: Mashups are a interactive genre of web applications which accumulates data from various sources and conflates it in a single integrated application. Mashup generally collects data from Feeds and Web Services.

Microformats: Microformats are a set of simple open data formats, which allows the normal data in HTML and XHTML to be categorized by providing annotations in the existing markup. It aims at easier access of information such as contact addresses, locations etc making it easily placeable by the searching softwares.

Perpetual Beta: Perpetual Beta is the software stage where the software is launched and is always under constant updates, which could be monthly, weekly or even daily. It follows the principle of "release early and release often", thus a software is released at a premature state and new features are added frequently.

Podcast: Podcast is a form of a feed carrying digital media files which could be downloaded or streamed on media players. Online radio is a well comprehensible example of a podcast.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication is a collection of feed formats. It is used to syndicate updated content from a website.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization is a process of improving your rankings on the search engines by using a set of techniques, which include ameliorating the quality of content and code of the website, placing links at strategic locations on the web and adhering to some web standards.

Silverlight: Silverlight is a Microsoft technology to develop Rich Internet Applications, which run on browsers by downloading a small plugin. It provides enhanced user-experience and media functionalities and is a strong competitor of the Adobe Flash. Silverlight is a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation of the .NET 3.0 framework and is coded using XAML.

Social Bookmarking: Social Bookmarking is a folksonomy practice through which users bookmark pages on the web and create custom tags to annotate these pages.

Social Networking: Social networking is a method to promote online collaboration of people by creating communities of (net)citizens with similar interests. It is a popular method to connect with friends online.

Tagging: Tagging is a practice of annotating the web content by creating tags or keywords to identify them. Also see: Folksonomy

Weblog: See: Blog

Web Service: Web Services are the modules enable a programmer to use these modules in their programs without actually coding them. It allows machine to machine data transfer between applications in XML format that follow the SOAP standard.

Wiki: Wiki is a web application which allows you to easily create and edit content on the web. It is used to create collaborative websites and is a great tool for social content creation and organization.

XAML: eXtensible Application Markup Language is a declarative XML-based language by Microsoft. It is a markup language enabling greater collaboration between designers and developers by providing a common platform for both.

XHTML: eXtensible HyperText Markup Language is a standard W3C markup language, which is a reformation of HTML adhering to the XML standard.

XML: eXtensible Markup Language is a markup language which allows users to generate their own tags. It enables creation of structured data that could be easily exchanged over the web.


Note: As most other stuff of Web 2.0, this list is also in the 'perpetual beta' state. This list is bound to future enhancements and modifications.