Glossary of Terms
A
Adwords
Is Google's flagship advertising product and main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads.
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B
Blog
A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger" – an online version of a diary.
It is common for blogs to be available as RSS feeds.
Browser
A web browser is a software application such as Internet Explorer, Firefox etc. which enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network.
Byte
A set of ‘Bits’ that represent a single character. Usually there are 8 Bits in a Byte (hence our name!).
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C
CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)
A standard for specifying the appearance of text and other elements on a web page. CSS is typically used to provide a single "library" of styles that are used over and over throughout a large number of related documents, as in a web site.
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D
DNS (Domain Name System)
The unique name that identifies an Internet site. Domain Names always have 2 or more parts, separated by dots. The part on the left is the most specific, and the part on the right is the most general. A given machine may have more than one Domain Name but a given Domain Name points to only one machine.
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E
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F
FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
A very common method of moving files between two Internet sites.
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G
GIF (Graphic Interchange Format)
A common format for image files, especially suitable for images containing large areas of the same color. GIF format files of simple images are often smaller than the same file would be if stored in JPEG format, but GIF format does not store photographic images as well as JPEG.
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H
Host
Any computer on a network that is a repository for services available to other computers on the network. It is quite common to have one host machine providing several services, such as SMTP (email) and HTTP (web).
HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
The coding language used to create Hypertext documents for use on the World Wide Web.
The "hyper" in Hypertext comes from the fact that in HTML you can specify that a block of text, or an image, is linked to another file on the Internet. HTML files are meant to be viewed using a "Web Browser".
HTML is loosely based on a more comprehensive system for markup called SGML, and is expected to eventually be replaced by XML-based XHTML standards.
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)
The protocol for moving hypertext files across the Internet. Requires a HTTP client program on one end, and an HTTP server program (such as Apache) on the other end. HTTP is the most important protocol used in the World Wide Web (WWW).
Hypertext
Generally, any text that contains links to other documents - words or phrases in the document that can be chosen by a reader and which cause another document to be retrieved and displayed.
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I
Intranet
A private network inside a company or organisation that uses the same kinds of software that you would find on the public Internet, but that is only for internal use.
IP Number -- (Internet Protocol Number)
Sometimes called a dotted quad. A unique number consisting of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g. 165.113.245.2
ISP (Internet Service Provider)
An institution that provides access to the Internet in some form, usually for money.
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J
Java
Java is a network-friendly programming language invented by Sun Microsystems.
Java is often used to build large, complex systems that involve several different computers interacting across networks, for example transaction processing systems.
Java is also used to create software with graphical user interfaces such as editors, audio players, web browsers, etc.
Java is also popular for creating programs that run in small electronic devices, such as mobile phones.
Using small Java programs (called "Applets"), Web pages can include functions such as animations, calculators, and other fancy tricks.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert’s Group)
JPEG is most commonly mentioned as a format for image files. JPEG format is preferred to the GIF format for photographic images as opposed to line art or simple logo art.
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K
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L
LAN (Local Area Network)
A computer network limited to the immediate area, usually the same building or floor of a building.
Linux
A widely used Open Source Unix-like operating system. Linux was first released by its inventor Linus Torvalds in 1991. There are versions of Linux for almost every available type of computer hardware from desktop machines to IBM mainframes. The inner workings of Linux are open and available for anyone to examine and change as long as they make their changes available to the public. This has resulted in thousands of people working on various aspects of Linux and adaptation of Linux for a huge variety of purposes, from servers to TV-recording boxes.
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M
Meta Tag
A specific kind of HTML tag that contains information not normally displayed to the user. Meta tags contain information about the page itself, hence the name ("meta" means "about this subject")
Typical uses of Meta tags are to include information for search engines to help them better categorise a page.
You can see the Meta tags in a page if you view the page’s source code.
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N
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O
Open Source Software
Open Source Software is software for which the underlying programming code is available to the users so that they may read it, make changes to it and build new versions of the software incorporating their changes. There are many types of Open Source Software, mainly differing in the licensing term under which (altered) copies of the source code may (or must be) redistributed.
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P
PDF (Portable Document Format)
A file format designed to enable printing and viewing of documents with all their formatting (typefaces, images, layout, etc.) appearing the same regardless of what operating system is used, so a PDF document should look the same on Windows, Macintosh, linux, OS/2, etc. The PDF format is based on the widely used Postscript document-description language. Both PDF and Postscript were developed by the Adobe Corporation.
PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor)
PHP is a programming language used almost exclusively for creating software that is part of a web site. The PHP language is designed to be intermingled with the HTML that is used to create web pages. Unlike HTML, the PHP code is read and processed by the web server software (HTML is read and processed by the web browser software.)
POP (Point of Presence, also Post Office Protocol)
Two commonly used meanings:
Point of Presence and Post Office Protocol.
A Point of Presence usually means a city or location where a network can be connected to, often with dial up phone lines. So if an Internet company says they will soon have a POP in Belgrade, it means that they will soon have a local phone number in Belgrade and/or a place where leased lines can connect to their network.
A second meaning, Post Office Protocol refers to a way that e-mail client software such as Eudora gets mail from a mail server. When you obtain an account from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) you almost always get a POP account with it and it is this POP account that you tell your e-mail software to use to get your mail. Another protocol called IMAP is replacing POP for email.
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Q
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R
RSS (Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication)
A commonly used protocol for syndication and sharing of content originally developed to facilitate the syndication of news articles, now widely used to share the contents of blogs.
RSS is an XML-based summary of a web site, usually used for syndication and other kinds of content-sharing.
There are RSS "feeds" which are sources of RSS information about web sites, and RSS "readers" which read RSS feeds and display their content to users.
RSS is being overtaken by a newer, more complex protocol called Atom.
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S
Search Engine
A (usually web-based) system for searching the information available on the Web.
Some search engines work by automatically searching the contents of other systems and creating a database of the results. Other search engines contains only material manually approved for inclusion in a database, and some combine the two approaches.
Security Certificate
A chunk of information (often stored as a text file) that is used by the SSL protocol to establish a secure connection.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
The practice of designing web pages so that they rank as high as possible in search results from search engines.
There is "good" SEO and "bad" SEO. Good SEO involves making the web page clearly describe its subject, making sure it contains truly useful information, including accurate information in Meta tags, and arranging for other web sites to make links to the page. Bad SEO involves attempting to deceive people into believing the page is more relevant than it truly is by doing things like adding inaccurate Meta tags to the page.
Server
A computer, or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running, e.g. "Our mail server is down today, that's why e-mail isn't getting out."
A single server machine can (and often does) have several different server software packages running on it, thus providing many different servers to clients on the network.
Sometimes server software is designed so that additional capabilities can be added to the main program by adding small programs known as servlets.
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
The main protocol used to send electronic mail from server to server on the Internet.
SQL (Structured Query Language)
A specialised language for sending queries to databases. Most industrial-strength and many smaller database applications can be addressed using SQL. Each specific application will have its own slightly different version of SQL implementing features unique to that application, but all SQL-capable databases support a common subset of SQL.
SSL (Secure Socket Layer)
A protocol designed by Netscape Communications to enable encrypted, authenticated communications across the Internet.
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T
TLD (Top Level Domain)
The last (right-hand) part of a complete Domain Name. For example in the domain name www.matisse.net ".net" is the Top Level Domain.
There are a large number of TLD's, for example .biz, .com, .edu, .gov, .info, .int, .mil, .net, .org, and a collection of two-letter TLD's corresponding to the standard two-letter country codes, for example, .us, .ca, .jp, etc.
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U
URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
A URL is a pointer to a resource on the World Wide Web, e.g. http://www.overbyteinteractive.com/glossary.htm#U
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V
VPN (Virtual Private Network)
Usually refers to a network in which some of the parts are connected using the public Internet, but the data sent across the Internet is encrypted, so the entire network is "virtually" private.
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W
WAN (Wide Area Network)
Any internet or network that covers an area larger than a single building or campus.
Wiki
A wiki is a web site for which the content can be easily edited and altered from the web browser in which you are viewing it. Typically there is an "edit" button on each page and the wiki is configured to allow either anyone or only people with passwords to edit each page. The word "wiki" comes from a Hawaiian word meaning "quick."
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X
XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
A widely used system for defining data formats. XML provides a very rich system to define complex documents and data structures such as invoices, molecular data, news feeds, glossaries, inventory descriptions, real estate properties, etc.
As long as a programmer has the XML definition for a collection of data (often called a "schema") then they can create a program to reliably process any data formatted according to those rules.
XML is a subset of the older SGML specification - the definition of XML is SGML minus a couple of dozen items.
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Y
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Z
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References and definitions from Wikipedia