Technology overview

Technology overview

The sometimes complex and continually evolving technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes server-software, content-syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-oriented browsers with plugins and extensions, and various client-applications. The differing, yet complementary approaches of such elements provide Web 2.0 sites with information-storage, creation, and dissemination challenges and capabilities that go beyond what the public formerly expected in the environment of the so-called "Web 1.0".

Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques:

* Cascading Style Sheets to aid in the separation of presentation and content
* Folksonomies (collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging)
* Microformats extending pages with additional semantics
* REST and/or XML- and/or JSON-based APIs
* Rich Internet application techniques, often Ajax and/or Flex,Flash-based
* Semantically valid XHTML and HTML markup
* Syndication, aggregation and notification of data in RSS or Atom feeds
* mashups, merging content from different sources, client- and server-side
* Weblog-publishing tools
* wiki or forum software, etc., to support user-generated content
* Internet privacy, the extended power of users to manage their own privacy in cloaking or deleting their own user content or profiles.