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A B C
D E F
G H I
J K L M
N O P Q
R S T U
V W X
Y Z
- ADSL
- Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. New technology to carry high speed
data over ordinary phone lines. It is up o 70 times as fast as a 28.8
modem, and can be used concurrently with voice over the same line. It
is gradually being offered to homes commercially now. It is called "asymmetric"
because download speeds to the subscriber are faster than upload speeds
from the subscriber.
- animated GIF
- A GIF graphic file, which consists of two or more images shown in
a timed sequence to give the effect of motion.
- applet
- An application that is downloaded from a web page and executed by
browser software. Also, an HTML tag that defines an applet program.
- ASP
- Active Server Pages or Application Service Provider
- bandwidth
- Literally, the frequency width of a transmission channel in Hertz,
kiloHertz, megaHertz, etc. Often used as an expression of the amount
of data that can be sent through a circuit. The greater the bandwidth,
the greater the amount of data that can travel in a given time period.
- Banner ad
- Also referred to as a banner ad, a banner is a typically rectangular
advertisement placed on a Web site either above, below or on the sides
of the Web site's main content and is linked to the advertiser's own
Web site. In the early days of the Internet, banners were ads with text
and graphic images. Today, with technologies such as Flash, banners
have gotten much more complex and can be ads with text, animated graphics
and sound. Most commerce-related Web sites use banner ads.
- bookmark
- Just as a paper bookmark is used as a reminder of the page you are
on in a book, electronic bookmarks are used to bring you back to a website
or other site you may want to return to. The Netscape browser lets you
bookmark any site and save the bookmarks in a file you can recall at
any time. Microsoft Internet Explorer uses the term "favorite" instead
of bookmark for the same concept.
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
- Cascading Style Sheets is a technique built into version 4.0 and later
browsers that support styles for pages. For example, you can set up
styles for fonts and page layouts that will apply automatically to pages
developed under a particular style you develop. This technique is useful,
but the present version browsers from Netscape and Microsoft are quite
different in their implementation, and what works with one is not likely
to work for the other. For compatibility, care has to be taken to use
common elements.
- CGI
- Common Gateway Interface. A method used by WWW pages to communicate
with programs run on the web server.
- chat
- A form of real-time electronic communications where participants type
what they want to say, and it is repeated on the screens of all other
participants in the same chat. Internet Relay Chat or IRC is an Internet
protocol for chat, and there are many other chat systems.
- Cold Fusion
- Software to build easily build Rich Internet Applications that integrate
with databases, XML, web services, Macromedia Flash, and more. ColdFusion
empowers developers with a productive scripting environment and integrated
search and charting capabilities.
- content
- Generally, the information provided on a web page, as opposed to its
design and layout. Content can take the form of text, graphics, audio,
video, or a searchable database.
- database
- A collection of data records. On web databases, records may consist
of web pages, or graphics, or audio files, or newspaper files, or books,
or movies, or press releases, or almost anything from very general to
very specific areas of interest. Records may or may not be further broken
into fields. Database records are usually indexed and come with a search
interface to find records of interest.
- domain name
- Domain name addresses, together with IP addresses, are the two forms
of Internet addresses in common use. Domain name addresses all end with
a correct top-level domain. The top-level domains may be any of these:
- com
- net
- pro
- gov
- org
- int
- mil
- biz
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- edu
- info
- museum
- name
- aero
- coop
- a two-letter country code, such as ca, uk, or us
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- A complete domain address adds one or more terms to the left
of the top-level domain, separated by dots. The top-level domain
at the right is the most general; each term to the left is more
specific.
- dot-com
- Nickname for the many commercial businesses that have registered
names in the .com domain.
- download
- To transfer a file from another system to your own computer
system via a modem over telephone or cable lines or a telnet connection.
- Director
- Create rich interactive content that can be deployed anywhere.
Macromedia Director is a powerful authoring environment for creating
compelling interactive experiences that deliver results.
- Dynamic HTML (DHTML)
- A more powerful model for HTML that allows absolute control
of positioning of elements on a page and more powerful control
of events. It is supported by MSIE 4.0 and partially by Netscape
4.0.
- e-mail
- Electronic mail. One of the earliest standard Internet protocols
which enables people with different computers and operating systems
to communicate with each other. E-mail allows one-to-one or one-to-many
mailings. Mail is received and held by a mail server within an
organization or by an Internet service provider until the addressee
logs on to collect the mail. The Internet e-mail standards include
no provision for authenticating the sender, which makes it possible
for spammers to use false From addresses and routing.
- extranet
- A network that supplements a closed intranet by providing access
to customers, suppliers, subcontractors, and others outside the
organization who have a need for selective information from the
organization. It is not accessible to the Internet at large.
- FAQ
- Acronym for Frequently Asked Questions. FAQ files are collections
of common questions and answers for a particular subject area.
For example, see the Navigating the Net FAQ for general Internet
and World Wide Web questions and answers and the Publishing on
the Web FAQ for questions and answers on creating web pages.
- Flash
- A bandwidth friendly and browser independent vector-graphic
animation technology. As long as different browsers are equipped
with the necessary plug-ins, Flash animations will look the same.
With Flash, users can draw their own animations or import other
vector-based images.
- FTP File Transfer Protocol
- The Internet protocol that permits you to transfer files between
your system and another system. You can use its command language
from a shell account or various programs with SLIP or PPP accounts
that simplify the process.
- GIF
- Graphical Interchange Format. A bitmap graphical format originally
developed for CompuServe that is widely used in WWW pages. It
is particularly good for text art, cartoon art, poster art, and
line drawings- -all types with solid colors and distinct lines
or borders between different colors. GIF files use a .gif extension.
- GUI
- Graphical User Interface. Pronounced "gooey". An operating system
interace between the user and the computer based on graphics.
GUIs typically use a mouse or other tracking device and icons.
First developed by XEROX as an easier to learn interface than
text-based ones, it was adopted by Apple for the Macintosh, Microsoft
for Windows, and even for unix systems as XWindows.
- home page
- A home page is a web page. In most familiar terms, it is a personal
page for an individual. It can also be the basic main page for
a more complex web site for individuals, organizations, or web
communities. On complex web sites, it is the page which a server
will show when no HTML filename is listed, usually with the name
index.html, home.html, or default.html or the same names with
the shorter extension .htm.
- HTML
- HyperText Markup Language. The coding system used to create
WWW pages. A page written in HTML is a text file that includes
tags in angle brackets that control the fonts and type sizes,
insertion of graphics, layout of tables and frames, paragraphing,
calls to short runnable programs, and hypertext links to other
pages. Files written in HTML generally use an .html or .htm extension.
- http
- HyperText Transfer Protocol. It is the main protocol used on
the World Wide Web that enables linking to other web sites. Addressing
to other web pages begins with "http://" and is followed by the
domain name or IP address.
- hyperlink
- A link in a web page that brings you to another location or
resource when activated. Hyperlinks usually appear as underlined
text and printed in a contrasting color, but they may also appear
as graphics, such as buttons to click. Hyperlinks may link to
another place in the same page, to a different page, to play an
audio or video file, to download a file, to set up a message to
an e-mail address, to search a database, to read Usenet newsgroups,
and to link to other Internet resources.
- Illustrator
- A vector graphics program by Adobe.
- Intranet
- A network of networks that interconnects within a single widespread
organization and uses the Internet Protocol (IP). The sites within
an Intranet are generally closed to the Internet and are accessible
to organization members only.
- IP address
- IP addresses, together with domain addresses are the two forms
of Internet addresses in common use. IP addresses consist of four
numbers between 0 and 255, separated by dots.
- ISDN
- Integrated Services Digital Network. A technology that carries
data over phone lines at up to 128Kbps for dialup users, but extends
to fast broadband communications, too. It applies to the first
three layers of the OSI and TCP/IP models.
- ISP
- Internet Service Provider.
- Java
- A programming language developed by Sun Microsystems based on
C++. It is used with web pages to create applets that will run
on different platforms.
- JavaScript
- A script language (with little in common with Java) developed
by Netscape for writing short programs embedded in a web page.
It is supported by Netscape from version 2.0 on and Microsoft
and AOL browsers from version 4.0 on. MSIE 3.0 partially supports
some features of JavaScript.
- JPEG
- Joint Photographic Experts Group, a graphical format that is
widely used in WWW pages. It is particularly well suited to photographs
and 3D or VRML images where there is a continuous range of colors
or shades. It is a lossy format that can be reduced in file size
by reducing the detail in the image. JPEG files use a .jpg or
less commonly, .jpeg or .jpe extension.
- link
- An active connection to another web page, location in a web
page, file, or other Internet resource. Selecting the link takes
you to the new location or resource.
- meta
- A prefix meaning "information about".
- meta tag
- In HTML or XML, a tag used in the header of a page to provide
information about the page. There may be multiple meta tags in
a header, each with different information. In current usage, each
tag includes the name of the information and the content that
supports that name. Commonly used meta tag names are author,description,
keywords, date, and copyright.
- modem
- Short for modulator/demodulator. A modem is used between a computer
and a phone or cable line to convert the computer's digital signal
to an analog signal for the line and vice versa.
- page
- (noun) A document displayed on the web. A page may consist of
a single screen or multiple screens reached by scrolling down
or to the right.
- palette
- The set of colors used in a picture or on a computer screen.
Older computers typically used only 16 colors. Modern ones use
at least 256 colors, which can be coded by 8 bits of information.
With advanced color cards and monitors 65.5 thousand colors (16-bit)
or 16 million colors (24-bit) are used. Different web browsers
and computer platforms do not necessarily use identical palettes.
There is a set of 216 colors that are considered browser and platform
safe, which web page designers should use, if they want screens
to look essentially the same on each computer that views them.
- PDF
- Adobe's Page Description Format. It is often used as a format
which allows much more complete, controlled layout of a page and
its graphics and text than conventional HTML does. It requires
a browser plug-in to see a web page in PDF format. Files will
usually have a .pdf extension. To create a page in PDF format,
you need Adobe Acrobat (not the free Acrobat Reader) or other
premium Adobe software.
- pixel
- One dot on a computer screen. Todays least expensive monitors
typically are 640 pixels wide and 480 pixels high. Larger and
more expensive monitors range up to 1600 x 1200 pixels and special
purpose monitors may go much higher than that.
- Photoshop
- A leading paint program from Adobe Systems, Inc. For many years,
Photoshop (which includes Image Ready) has been the model against
which other paint programs are compared. Fireworks is a similar
program to Photoshop.
- plug-in
- A piece of software that plugs into a main program to give it
added capability, for example, you can add a Quick Time plug-in
to your browser to play Quick Time movies on the web.
- port
-
- A connection to a computer to enable other devices, such
as printers, modems, monitors, keyboards, mice, etc. to interface
with the computer.
- A logical connection to a network. Different port numbers
are used for different purposes, for example, HTTP usually
uses port 80.
- portal
- A gateway or entrance to the web. In common usage it has come
to describe a starting point page with a hierarchical, topical
directory, a search window, and added features like news headlines
and stock quotes.
- Quick Time
- Multimedia software from Apple Computer that integrates full-motion
video and sound into application programs.
- search engine
- A utility that will search the Internet, an Intranet, a site,
or a database for terms that you select. Search engines on the
web consist of four elements:
- A program that roams the area to be searched, collecting
data records (typically, web pages) and links to more data.
These are variously known as spiders, worms, crawlers, or
other colorful names. Commercial databases, on the other hand,
may collect data records in other ways, such as systematically
entering the full text of newspapers or journals.
- A database or collection of records recovered by the spiders
or other type of collector
- An index of the database collected to enable fast access
to terms that you search for and their supporting records.
Indexes may be enhanced by controlled vocabularies.
- A search interface--the form in which you enter your search
terms and the software behind it that queries the index, retrieves
matches, and ranks for relevance and organizes the data for
follow-on searches.
Each of the major search engines differs in its approach to these
four elements.
- server
- A computer in a network that provides access to other computers
in the network to programs, web pages, data, or other files and
services, such as printer access or communications access. A server
may also authenticate requests for files and services before providing
them.
- SMIL
- Short for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, a new
markup language being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) that would enable Web developers to divide multimedia content
into separate files and streams (audio, video, text, and images),
send them to a user's computer individually, and then have them
displayed together as if they were a single multimedia stream.
The ability to separate out the static text and images should
make the multimedia content much smaller so that it doesn't take
as long to travel over the Internet.
- SGML
- Acronym for Standard Graphics Markup Language. It was adopted
in 1986 as an international standard (ISO 8879) for the creation,
management, storage, and delivery of information products. HTML
and its possible successor, XML, are both subsets of SGML.
- site
- A host on the Internet which allows remote access by such protocols
as http, ftp, telnet, or gopher. A site may consist of a single
page or many pages under a common site name. Whether two addresses
with a common site name are one site or more than one may vary
depending on your point of view. For example, to some, all pages
at the Internet Service Provider delphiforums.com might be considered
one site. But an individual who has set up personal web pages
at people.delphiforums.com will refer to his or her pages as "my
web site."
- SMTP
- Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The protocol used to send mail
between servers and to send mail from your client to a mail server.
Your address to send mail using software like Eudora, Pegasus,
or the mail clients in Netscape and MSIE will often begin with
smtp. For Delphi, the address to send mail through is smtp.delphiforums.com.
- spider
- A software robot that serves a search engine by exploring the
net, collecting web page addresses and page contents, and following
links from them to other addresses to collect still more web information.
Also known as a worm or crawler.
- Sound Forge
- A digital audio editor that includes a powerful set of audio
processes, tools, and effects for recording and manipulating audio.
- Splash page (or splash screen)
- An initial Web site page used to capture the user's attention
for a short time as a promotion or lead-in to the site home page
or to tell the user what kind of browser and other software they
need to view the site.
- streaming audio, streaming video
- Technologies which permit listening and watching continuously
as the signal is transferred to your system from a remote web
site. It requires a high degree of compression to transfer audio
or video (or both) at 28.8 Kbps or 14.4 Kbps speeds and still
retain quality music and non-jerky video. If stereo sound is desired,
there is a trade-off in the sound quality. These technologies
are continually improving and the sound and video sampling and
compression techniques are getting better. Faster connection speeds
are needed to improve quality substantially, and the speed must
be maintained over the entire path between the transmitting and
receiving systems. The systems generally use a few seconds buffering,
but signal slowdowns or interruptions longer than that break the
flow.
- tag
- In reference to web pages, a tag is an HTML command used in
laying out a web page and providing links to resources.
- TCP/IP
- Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. The protocols
that are the basis for transmitting and routing data packets on
the Internet. The Internet Protocol is the one thing that all
current Internet sites have in common.
- upload
- To transfer a file from your computer system to another system
via a modem over telephone or cable lines or a telnet connection.
Less precisely, it may also refer to a direct transfer from your
local terminal to a server over a local area network or an FTP
transfer from your system to a remote system.
- URL
- Uniform Resource Locator. URLs specify the location of a resource
in the Internet. You can type or paste a URL into the Location
window in your browser and then connect to it. The URL shows the
type of item and its basic address and path. The major types are
http, gopher, ftp, telnet, newsgroups, news articles, and files,
which may be programs, text, graphics, audio, video, etc.
- Usenet Newsgroups
- Usenet Newsgroups are discussion groups about a topic that is
reflected in their titles, such as comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure
or sci.astro.hubble. Many of the newsgroups have worldwide distribution,
and their followers post messages, properly called "articles",
for all to read and respond to. The "Usenet" part of the title
refers to their distribution via the unix to unix network. Strictly
speaking, newsgroups are a Usenet, not an Internet protocol, but
they are widely picked up by Internet providers.
There are eight major primary series of newsgroups: comp, humanities,
misc, news, rec, sci, soc, and talk. Newsgroups in the eight
primary series are only created after a formal approval process,
which includes formal discussion and voting. In addition, there
are less formal alternative newsgroups with the alt series the
primary one, and many others with a regional or local focus
such as the nyc series or the uk series or topics with limited
distribution and purpose like k12 or fedreg. To participate
in newsgroups, you should learn the purpose and the norms of
the newsgroup before posting any articles of your own. A good
rule of thumb is to read for two weeks before posting, and then
follow the norms. Many newsgroups post a FAQ: Frequently Asked
Questions file about once a month, which you should look at
before posting for the first time.
- vector graphics
- In mathematics and physics, a vector is a line which has a defined
starting point, a designated direction and a specified distance.
Vector graphics are line-based graphics. In vector graphics, vectors
determine how straight and curved lines (Beziers or splines) are
shaped between specific points. The lines and the colors of areas
enclosed by the lines make up the picture. Microsoft SYLK is an
example of a pure vector format. More commonly used are bitmap
files and hybrids of vector and bitmap known as metafiles.
- Virtual Private Network (VPN)
- A private network within a public network, usually on the Internet.
Privacy for the virtual network is achieved through encryption
and provides a less expensive option than using dedicated lines.
- VRML
- Virtual Reality Modelling Language. A graphical system that
creates views of 3-dimensional images that change as the viewer's
angle and position changes and light sources change. It can be
used to create an environment or world that appears realistic
as you "move" through it. It is widely used for games and for
educational applications. The technology is very young and growing
fast. It requires a fast computer and fast video support with
lots of memory to be effective.
- WAN
- Wide Area Network.
- Web ring
- A Web ring (or Webring) is a way of interlinking related Web
sites so that you can visit each site one after the other, eventually
(if you keep going) returning to the first Web site. Typically,
users can also elect to go backwards through the ring of sites,
skip a certain number at a time, visit sites randomly, or see
a list of all the sites on the ring. A ring is managed from one
site which includes a common gateway interface (CGI) application
that can select random sites and bypass sites that have dropped
out or aren't reachable.
- Web Hosting
- The World Wide Web (WWW), a web of worldwide servers connected
to the Internet, provides an easily used and understood method
of accessing electronic content. Accessing information requires
data communication between a Web-browser client and a Web-server
application. Web hosting, then, is a means of hosting the Web-server
application on a computer system through which electronic content
on the Internet is readily available to any Web-browser client.
- World Wide Web (WWW)
- The World Wide Web is an Internet protocol that makes use of
the HTML, hypertext, and hypermedia to create pages with links
to other pages. WWW pages can include graphics, audio, and video
as well as text.
- WYSIWYG
- Acronym for "What You See Is What You Get". The term applies
to word processors and web page development software where you
manipulate text and images directly without writing codes (such
as HTML or dot codes) for each attribute. An example of this type
of software is Dreamweaver by Macromedia.
- XML
- Acronym for eXtensible Markup Language. A richer subset of SGML
than HTML. It is a next step in the evolution of web data formats
beyond HTML.
- zip
- A method of file compression originally used with MSDOS and
a file extension for files which are zip compressed.
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