Usenet is a public discussion system which was developed to facilitate communication on the World Wide Web (WWW). Users from all over the world take part in the discussions to express their views on variety of topics and issues. Conceived by the students of the Duke University Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979, the Usenet looks like the bulletin boards and web forums. However the concept of Usenet is entirely different from these two even if the ultimate objective is same, i.e. to take part in online discussions or to broadcast certain information. The main difference between the Usenet and the Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) is that like the BBS the Usenet is not based on a central server and there is no central system owner, rather it is distributed among a large conglomeration of servers which change continuously and store and forward the Usenet messages to each other. Generally these servers operate in a loosely formed variable mesh topology.
Users of the Usenet generally read and post the messages on the local server operated by their ISP, University or by their employer. These messages are then exchanged among other servers online so that the information is available globally. The messages which the users read from or post to the Usenet are known as articles, posts, discussions or more popularly as news which are organized into different categories known as newsgroups. All the discussions are threaded with the help of news reader software. In order to use the Usenet the individuals have to subscribe themselves. Once they are logged into the user network (Usenet) the news client software application keeps track of all the activities of the users, activities like which articles they have read, the replies they have made or any new discussion initiated by them.
Generally, most of the discussions in a newsgroup are replies of some on going topics, i.e. one article is the reply of the other article. The set of articles which can be traced to one single no reply article is considered as a separate thread. Modern newsreaders display the discussions in the form of threads and sub-threads. This is very useful in case the users want to identify and follow a particular discussion in a high volume newsgroup.
Whenever a user starts a new discussion or replies to a post in a newsgroup it is available only for the users of that news server initially and then the different Usenet servers talk to each other periodically as per their configuration to copy the postings among each other and make them accessible on every network.
Usenet has its own cultural importance on the internet. It has given birth to many categories and sub-cultures and has offered millions of users an opportunity to express themselves, share their views on critical topics, help each other by giving suggestions and make friends. The messages or articles in a Usenet are transmitted in the same way the e-mails are sent. The only difference between the two is that the e-mails are restricted to their recipients but the Usenet users can access any information anytime.
Since its birth, the World Wide Web has been through various ups and downs, changes, modifications and upgrades but for the first time it happened that the whole ideology of the WWW has been changed. Recently the web has been through an impact full revolution, the revolution known as The Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 is basically an idea to transform the way we use the internet. It is aimed at providing freedom to the user; freedom of speech, freedom of expression and the most noticeable, the freedom to expand his/her social domain. Web 2.0 is targeted to build a society where every internet user can be a journalist, a musician, a painter, animator or anything else. With Web 2.0 you have complete freedom to portray yourself the way you want online. It lets you to give birth to the online communities, social networking web sites, wikis, blogs and much more. You can actually socialize on web and spend a quality time with your friends. The Web 2.0 has the power of the latest cutting edge technology which helps to create never seen before web tools, animations, graphics, photos, audio, video and much more. It gives you the opportunity to enhance the way to communicate with each other and brings all the elements of the world closer to each other.
The way internet users conveys message to each other has been completely changed by the Web 2.0. It has given a highly interactive platform which can be used to transform the web into an online café where people can talk, share and enjoy. Old style internet which consists of boring web pages and which provided limited amount of options to its users is now an obsolete term. The modern web is very young and full of energy, enthusiasm and aspirations.
Web 2.0 does not emphasize on the emergence of the new technologies. Rather it changed the way the web developers make use of different technologies. It has carved out a whole new mould in order to give the internet a new and exciting shape. According to Tim O’Reilly,” Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.” Although the Web 2.0 is perceived differently by different people and has been defined in more than one way, at its core it implies the new internet equipped with interconnectivity and interactive web content. It allows the internet users to do more than just simply retrieving the information via web sites. It offers them highly interactive web pages, e-business solutions, online shopping and social networking sites offering download and upload of the multimedia content. This means that the users not only publish their data on the web but they also have complete control over it. They can now create their own blogs, threads and web pages within seconds using the user friendly wizards available online. But the game is not over yet, the Web 2.0 still have lots of surprises which the users will explore down the line.
Since its evolution, the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) has been revised and upgraded a number of times in order to make the World Wide Web a better place to live virtually. HTML is a derivative of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), but its major flaw is that it is not extensible. Thus HTML is not appropriate for deployment under a network environment.
So, the World Wide Web Consortium (popularly known as W3C) decided to develop a new breed of extensible language and came up with XML, which stands for eXtensible Markup Language. Web developers use XML to dynamically describe the information stored on a web page. Though XML, the new generation web pages describes themselves which is helpful to gain good rankings in search engine listings and help the developers to write codes for custom search tools.
• XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
• XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
• XML shall be compatible with SGML.
• It shall be easy to write programs that process XML documents.
• The number of optional features shall be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero.
• XML documents shall be human-legible and reasonably clear.
• The XML design should be prepared quickly.
• The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
• XML documents shall be easy to create.
• Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.
(Source: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/)
XML is referred as a Metalanguage which describes other languages. It is called so because XML allows the web developers to create documents which describes themselves to their reader. Though the XML tags look like the HTML ones, the main difference between the two is that the HTML documents do not tell the web browser how to display the web page. On the other hand, the XML documents are downloaded by the web browser along with a style sheet or Document Type definition (DTD) which guides the web browser on how to display the web page.
In its raw form, an XML document looks like the HTML and SGML documents, but all are functionally different. The main difference between the HTML and XML coding is that the XML tags are very rigid. For example; the HTML language has tags which have a closing and which don’t have a closing section. But in XML either all the tags must exist in pair or announce to the reader that a closing tag is not present.
For example: in HTML you can use <BR> tag without having to close it, but in XML you have to use it as <BR>…</BR> or simply as <BR/> which announces that there is no closing tag for BR.
Another prominent difference between the two languages is that the XML requires all the tag attribute values to be enclosed within quotation marks. For example:
<font color=red>……</font>, this is wrong in XML. It should be like <font color=”red”>…….</font>
