Why does my address appear as part of my name 2506

If you view the source HTML for a particular page when you're viewing it ("at Google") what you'll generally see is:

a) a definition of what sort of HTML follows

b) lots of start-of-an-html-page definitions, eg the source code for all the JavaScript-enabled processing on the page (eg the things that will happen when you click on a 'button' on the page)

c) the actual text that you'll eventually be looking at, but parts of it will be enclosed in HTML to do things like set a font and set a colour

d) stuff for producing the bottom of the HTML page

So, individual parts of the text are wrapped up in colour-font-setting instructions etc, and the text as a whole is wrapped up in whole-page instructions.

You should look at the source for some typical pages, and see just how much "junk" is sent to you, compared with the volume of text (which is what you actually want to read).

Someone reading a news post in a newsreader will *only* have collected the text part (and headers, probably) from the news server, and will genrally only display the text part.

For someone using a web browser to read news, to get to the next post in the thread (for example) the user clicks on a 'button' on the web page. The browser sends a request to the webserver, which sends back a whole new page.

In a newsreader, you'd generally click on an icon in the dialogue box screen, and the software running on your computer immediately shows you the next news post that it already has stored on your machine. There's no request sent to a web server, and no wait for the page to come back.

When people complain about web interfaces, there are two problems in general. One is speed: it takes a while for a request to be sent back to the webserver, the webserver to decide what to send to you, generate the page (by merging some sort of template with the text that on that occasion is to be sent to you), and for that to get back to your computer. Then your computer has to format the page and display it to you. In a newsreader virtually none of that has to be done.

The other is functional: the only things you can do in a web interface are those that the web page designers have decided to offer to their users. The web server itself is probably capable of searching its database of news posts in lots of clever ways, but the web page designers might have decided to offer only a couple of simple types of search to the users, and written HTML for the pages which offer that. In general someone using a newsreader (which will work with some sort of news post database on the user's computer) will have designed something that's a great deal more powerful, and fast.

-- Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.