Some Internet Jargon Explained, Some Common Website And Internet Terms And Jargon

some web jargon explained

Bandwidth
How much stuff you can send through a connection. Usually measured in bits-per-second (bps).

Broadband
Usually refers to connections to the Internet with much greater bandwidth than you can get with a modem.

Browser
A programme (software), such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, used to look at various kinds of websites and other internet resources.

Cookies
A cookie is a small data file sent to your hard drive by some web sites. Most are used to make it more efficient for the person using the site and are usually used to store user Ids, passwords etc

CMS
Short for content management system, software or applications which enable yoou to have full management and updating rights over your website.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)
A standard set of code used for specifying the appearance of text and other elements. It was developed originally for use with web pages and HTML, but is now used in other applications built using XPFE. CSS is normally used to provide a single "library" of styles, used over and over to drive the style and look of a large number of related documents or pages, for example in a web site.

DHTML
DHTML, or Dynamic HyperText Markup Language, refers to websites using a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to create features such as enabling the visitor to drag items around on the web page, some simple kinds of animation, and many more.

Domain Name
This is the unique name that identifies an internet site. Domain names always have two or more parts, separated by dots.

Download
Download is the term used to describe the transfer of data to your computer.

Extranet
An intranet accesible to computers not physically part of a company's private network, but which is not accessible to the public. It might be used to allow vendors and business partners to access different parts of the company web site.

FTP
File Transfer Protocol is a tool used to move files through the internet from one computer to another.

GIF
This is a common format for image files, suitable for images containing large areas of the same color. GIF format does not store photographic images as well as JPEG.

Homepage
The first page of a web site. It is also used to describe the page a person has chosen to show when they first link to the internet.

Host
Any computer on a network which is a repository for services available to other computers on the network.

HTML
Hyper Text Markup language is the language used for publishing on the world wide web.

IE
Short for Internet Explorer, one of the browsers refrred to above.

Intranet
A private network inside a company or organisation using similar types of software you'd find on the public website, but which is for internal use only.

JavaScript
JavaScript is a programming language used mainly in web pages, often to add features that make the web page more interactive.

JPEG
A JPEG, or Joint Photographic Experts Group, is most commonly mentioned as the format for image files. JPEG format is preferred to the GIF format for photographic images.

Linux
A widely used Open Source Unix-like operating system. Linux was first released by its inventor Linus Torvalds in 1991.

Login
This is the account name or user ID given to a person to enable them to access certain areas on a computer or network.

Meta Tag
This is code used on a web page to describe the information contained on that page. It is a specific kind of HTML tag that contains information not normally displayed to the user. Typical uses of meta tags are to include information for search engines to help them better categorize a page.

Network
Any time you connect two or more computers together so they can share resources, you have a computer network.

Open Source
This is software for which the underlying programming code is available, ususally free, to the users so that they may read it, make changes to it, and build new versions of the software incorporating their changes.

PHP
PHP is a programming language used almost exclusively for creating software which is part of a web site.

Portal
Usually used as a marketing term to describe a website which is intended to be the first place people see when using the web. Often a "portal site" has a catalogue of web sites, a search engine, or both.

Protocol
On the internet "protocol" usually refers to a set of rules which define an exact format for communication between systems.

Search Engine
A search engine is a web site which enables people to search for particular topics on the web.

Server
A computer, or software package, which offers a specific 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."

SMTP
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is the main protocol used to send electronic mail from server to server on the Internet.

Spam (or Spamming)
The inappropriate attempt to use a mailing list, or other networked communications facility as if it was a broadcast medium by sending the same message to a large number of people who didn't want it or ask for it.

Traffic
This is one way of finding out how a site is doing by measuring the volume of visitors to a website over a specific period.

Trojan Horse
A computer programme which is either hidden inside another programme or which pretends to be something it is not, to trick potential users into running it.

URL
The Uniform Resource Locator is the address of any "resource" on the web. The term URL is basically synonymous with URI. URI has replaced URL in technical specifications.

XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language)
Basically HTML expressed as valid XML. XHTML is intended to be used in the same places you would use HTML (creating web pages) but is much more strictly defined, which makes it a lot easier to create sofware which can read it, edit it, check it for errors, etc.

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.

Webmaster
The webmaster is the person responsible for the web site.