Chapter 2 - A Review of the Technological Stream

Abstract

This chapter examines the advances in Web technology, with an emphasis on languages, formats, and standards that have been developed in recent years and that see a confluence today in various ways. It focuses on the languages and Web technology that have glued together the Web from the very beginning but have evolved over time as well. It also discusses the disruptive technology of P2P networks, their structures, and applications. Some Web pages nowadays behave more like programs; this process is a clear evolution, not a revolution of the Web that is mirrored in the development and use of the underlying Web standards and technologies. It is the shift from a “page-based” Web to an “application based” Web, in which many pages host application programs, often more than just one. HTML as well as XML is cornerstones of Web languages from which several other standards have emerged. By adding style sheets and programming language elements such as JavaScript, HTML becomes DHTML (with “D” for “dynamic”), and finally Ajax, one of the core Web 2.0 technologies. It has become common in the context of the Web to employ scripting languages, also called scripting programming languages or simply script languages. Web pages are commonly described using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML, which uses markups, also called tags, in plain text files to transport information about the structure and presentation of a page. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C recommendation for a general-purpose markup language that supports a large variety of applications. Web communication particularly between a browser and a Web server is based on the client/server paradigm. It has become common in the context of the Web to employ scripting languages, also called scripting programming languages or simply script languages to make Web pages more interactive.