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addon domain: A new domain added on top of your main domain. It points to a subdirectory within your web site but looks like a separate site. This allows you to use multiple domain names within one web hosting account.

ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line): A type of DSL that has different upload and download speeds.

Apache (Apache HTTP Server): The most used web server software on the planet. It is open source and runs on every platform available.

ASP (Active Server Pages): A Microsoft server-side scripting environment. Their equivalent of JSP.

auto responder: An email configuration that automatically responds to incoming messages with a canned reply of your choice.

bandwidth: The amount of data you transfer in a unit of time, usually the total amount of data delivered to all visitors in a month from one web site. Data can be web pages, images, text files, audio files, video files, or anything else in any other format, since it’s all just data. You pay more to deliver more, and will either pay surcharge if you go over your limit or will need to upgrade your hosting plan, or both.

blog: Short for “web log”, an online journal. One who owns a blog is a blogger. Blogging is the act of writing blog entries. Posting means putting a blog entry online. Each entry is a post. Normally the most recent post appears at the top of the blog’s home page. Most blogs are written by one person on one topic or on a narrow range of topics.

browser (web browser): A computer program for displaying web pages. It interprets hypertext, makes it readable, and allows you to travel around the world wide web. The first browser was called WorldWideWeb, and was written in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of HTML. The origin of the word “browser” is unclear, but may have come from the generic term for user interfaces to computerized text files. The appearance of web pages often changes depending on which browser is used to view them, since there are still no mandatory, universal standards. Berners-Lee also invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and he has served as the W3C’s Director since he helped to found it in 1994.

CGI (Common Gateway Interface): A web technology enabling visiting software clients to communicate with a web server. When a request reaches a CGI script the server executes the appropriate program and then returns its output.

CMS (Content management system): Software written to allow authorized non-technical people to make changes to web sites. Easily. Without too much fuss.

cookie: A small piece of data sent from a web server to your browser, which then stores it. The server and the browser use the cookie to identify you. Since web servers normally forget about you each time they return a web page to your browser you need something like this to make shopping carts and online stores practical. Otherwise web sites would keep forgetting about you and you would never be able to buy anything.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet): Created by Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos in the early 1990s, it is a handy way to format web pages. A stylesheet is a set of rules, and each rule is a statement about style. Stylesheets “cascade” or inherit from one another, and because of this many stylesheets and mixtures of styles can apply to one web page.

database: An organized collection of data. A database is usually managed by a separate program called a database management system. Having a separate program do this makes storing and retrieving data much simpler. Most current database management systems use SQL.

dead link: A hyperlink that no longer works. Also called a broken link. Trying to use one of these will give you a “404 error”, which indicates that the web server tried to respond, but couldn’t find the page you wanted.

dialup connection: A connection to the internet through your telephone. It uses a translator called a modem, which MO(dulates) and DEM(odulates) signals, translating computer signals into telephone signals and vice versa. Dialup provides a slow and unreliable connection, but it’s usually the cheapest option.

domain name: A web address. It is the unique name that identifies an internet site and allows people to locate it. Each machine connected to the internet has an address known as an internet Protocol address (IP address). It takes the form of four numbers separated by dots (like 123.45.67.890). A domain name is like that, except that it is human-readable. A domain name consists of a top-level part and a second-level part. Take “www.foodle.com”. The “com” part is the top-level domain name. And the “foodle” part is the second-level domain name. The second-level domain name refers to the thing behind the internet address and may be a business name or a brand. Second-level domains must be registered through a registrar accredited by the internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN). Some top-level domain names are restricted to those who meet certain criteria. Check out the following: “aero” is reserved for aviation; “biz” is reserved for businesses; “com” was intended just for commercial sites but has become a general-purpose top level domain name; “coop” is for cooperative businesses; “edu” is reserved for educational institutions; “info” is unrestricted, but generally used for informative purposes; “mil” applies exclusively to the United States military; “museum” is reserved for museums; “name” is reserved exclusively for individuals; “net” is unrestricted, but primarily used by internet service providers; “org” is also unrestricted, but mainly used by nonprofit organizations; “us” is a country-code top-level domain available exclusively for residents of the United States and its territories. (And there are more, many of them representing individual nations.)

domain registrar: The company that reserves your unique domain name for you, so you can use it to identify your web site, and no one else can. A company like this is accredited by the internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

domain registration: the process of reserving a second-level domain with a registrar. “Registering” a domain name means you are assigning a unique domain name to your web site for a specific period. You pay for this.

download: A vague term for moving files from one computer to another. Generally a download is from a server or mainframe or network to a smaller computer or a desktop computer. Upload is the opposite of this.

DNS (Domain Name Service, Domain Name Server, or Domain Name System): A way of translating domain names into IP addresses. The system is based on the service, which runs on servers. IP addresses are numeric while domain names are alphabetic and therefore much easier to read and write. For example, http://207.44.278.14 might translate to http://www.foobar.com. One is a lot easier for humans to remember than the other. Think of this as something like the internet’s phone book.

DSL (Digital Subscriber Line): An internet connection over a telephone line, but using a digital signal. Much faster than a traditional dialup connection with a traditional modem. Still requires extra hardware called a DSL modem, or sometimes a DSL gateway.

dynamic site: A web site presenting variable content assembled on the fly from what is stored in a database. Content varies based on user requests, or may change over time as inventories, products, or news items change. It can also vary as people post to forums, or update wiki pages. And different things may be displayed depending on a visitor’s access level.

e-commerce: Electronic commerce, or business done over the internet.

email: Electronic mail. Messages sent over the internet. The most popular internet application there is. An email server is a web server dedicated to sending and receiving email.

email forwarder: Like an auto responder, but it automatically and silently forwards messages to another address instead of replying to them.

email hosting: An internet host that runs email servers, and sells email services.

firewall: Software and hardware set up to protect a single computer or a whole computer network from unauthorized outside access.

Flash: A software environment from Adobe for creating applications that display animated effects. Flash requires supplementary browser software called a plugin to view. Flash is often tediously annoying, though if it is done well and used appropriately can really add substance to a web site.

form: The online version of a paper document. HTML is used to build fields, text entry areas, check boxes, radio buttons, and selection lists that mimic those of printed forms. Online forms collect information you enter and then transmit it back to the originating web site.

forum: Usually part of a large web site. This is place where various people can make comments, normally on a narrow range of topics, for the benefit of other visitors. Some forums are public and some for paying members only. Those who participate are considered members of a discussion group. An entry at a forum is called a “post”. Each line of discussion on a single topic is called a “thread”.

free software: Software licensed under terms that allow users to modify it, redistribute it with or without modification, commercially or noncommercially, free or for sale. This is not “freeware”, which is “free as in beer” but locked. A better term for free software may be “software libre”. Free Software as a movement began in 1984 with the GNU Project. Its chief spokesperson is Richard M. Stallman. Free software is similar to open source but more political in intent, and associated with the GNU Public License and its idea of “copyleft”.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol): A protocol for uploading files to web servers through a network or over the internet.

GIF (Graphical Interchange Format): Developed in 1987 by Compuserve, for compressing images into computer files. It can display only 256 colors.

home page: A web site’s entry point. A file that loads by default when you access a web site. Often this file is named “index.html” or “index.htm”.

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language): Developed by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, the European particle physics institute, as a way for scientists to communicate. HTML specifies a format for web documents. So what is hypertext? “Text” is written words, and “hyper” means “above”, or “about.” So hypertext is text that’s about text. It’s a way of organizing text that allows the reader to get to related documents through what we now call “links.” It’s like reading an article and at the same time flipping pages back and forth to look up related things. Markup language is really more familiar than you think. Every time you cross things off your grocery list, or add things to it, you’re doing markup. Markup is a way of editing to help get a message across. Printers, editors, and proofreaders have used markup for centuries. A markup language is a formal kind of markup. It’s a set of rules that tell a computer what to do. The computer needs specifics, so a markup language has specific symbols and commands that supply instructions about a web page’s structure and appearance, and maybe its meaning as well, to a computer.

HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol): Specifies how a web browser communicates with a web server to exchange files: text files, graphic images, sound, video, and so on, but mostly hypertext, like documents written using HTML.

hyperlink: A connection (a link) from one spot in one document to another document on the same or another web site. Hyperlinks are found in hypertext documents.

hypertext: Text containing hyperlinks. The name was coined by Ted Nelson in about 1965. It is a way of accessing information non-sequentially, in that you can jump around from place to place and from document to document.

internet: A world-wide, publicly-accessible network connecting millions of computers and allowing them to communicate with one another.

intranet: A private little internet that runs inside a LAN (local area network), usually within one business or one institution.

IP Address (Internet Protocol Address): A unique number identifying a device connected to the internet, like the number on your house or mailbox.

Java: A programming language developed by Sun Microsystems. It is widely used for web programming, especially in large enterprises.

JavaScript: A scripting language developed by Netscape to sound like a relative of the Java programming language. But it isn’t. Its proper name is ECMAScript (after the European Computer Manufacturer’s Association). It is normally used to make web pages interactive.

JPG (JPEG): An acronym standing for Joint Photographic Experts Group. A way of compressing and storing images in computer files. This is the most common image file format on the web, but some image quality is lost from files compressed into this format.

JSP (JavaServer Pages): A Java based technology allowing the insertion of executable scripts into web pages. It is normal HTML which contains pieces of embedded Java code. It is most often used by large enterprises. Sun’s equivalent of ASP.

link: A hyperlink.

Linux hosting: Uses Linux, a A UNIX-like operating system to enable web sites and hosting software.

lossless compression: File compression without loss of data. Normally used in reference to image files, but applies to any computer file.

lossy compression: File compression that results in a permanent loss of data. If used on image files, then some image data is destroyed, and the image is degraded but if done judiciously the degradation may not be noticeable on a computer screen.

MB (Megabyte): 1024 kilobytes. One kilobyte is 1024 bytes. One byte is eight bits. Eight bits are enough to define the numbers from zero to 255, which in turn is enough to translate common alphabetic characters and numbers into the signals that computers can handle.

multimedia: Mixed text, graphics, video, and audio. Confused? Turn on your TV. That’s multimedia.

online: Term for being connected to the internet.

online marketing: Advertising done on the web, usually through email, which may be simple text or HTML sent as email.

open source: Software distributed in a human-readable form with licensing that guarantees the universal right to use, modify, and redistribute it. (For more info, see “The Open Source Initiative” at www.opensource.org).

parked domain: An extra domain name mapped to an existing web site. Say you own foobar.com, foobar.org, foobar.net, and foobar.biz. Parking lets you point all these domain names to a single web site. That way you still get traffic if someone mistakenly types “foobar.org” instead of “foobar.com”. In effect you buy one domain name and then park others on top of it. You also protect your base domain name from someone who uses the same second level domain name as yours, but with a different high level domain. Compare www.whitehouse.org to www.whitehouse.gov. They aren’t the same place.

PDF: A file format that preserves fonts, images, graphics and layout of a source document regardless of the software, hardware and operating used to create it. PDF documents are device and resolution independent, meaning that they can be read and displayed in various browsers running on various operating systems on different computers.

Perl (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language): A commonly used scripting language, especially good for handling text, and commonly used to write CGI programs.

PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor): An open source, interpreted, cross-platform, server-side scripting language. PHP commands are intermixed with HTML in a web page. “Preprocessor” means that it acts before the page data becomes HTML and presented in a browser.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics): An image file format. Uses lossless compression, supports images with millions of colors and can provide transparent backgrounds.

POP3: The latest version of POP.

POP (Post Office Protocol): A standard communication protocol for delivering email to and retrieving it from an email server.

protocol: A set of rules and processes that enable computers to connect to and communicate with one another. A protocol specifies how data is transmitted, how errors are handled, and how data is compressed.

script: An executable list of commands written in a scripting language such as Perl, Ruby, Python, or JavaScript. These are usually more flexible and simpler than other computer languages, and therefore better for writing scripts. Server-side scripts run on a web server. Client-side scripts run inside the browser on your desktop. Scripts can be embedded in HTML to produce dynamic web pages (which often also use a database).

search engine: A name for a combination of software and hardware whose purpose is to digest the internet and make a gigantic catalog, so you can find what you want. This is done by “web spiders”, programs that send out feelers and crawl along, locating whatever is out there. The results are not only cataloged but ranked. Web sites that a lot of other web sites are linked to rank high. In other words, if a lot of people visit your web site and create a link to it, it’s because your site is valuable, so it might be worthwhile for others to visit, so the search engine gives it a relatively high ranking.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The practice of tweaking your web site to make it more reachable, more search engine friendly, more readable, more useful, and more popular so that its ranking goes up. Well-designed sites can get higher rankings but only if they’re popular among real people. Trying too hard and using too many tricks can get your site banned from search engines altogether. They are actually that smart.

server: Technically this is just a process that responds to requests, but the process can be carried out on a separate computer (which is then called a server), or by a separate piece of software (which is then called a server). This gets especially confusing when server software runs on a hardware server, and the whole shebang is called a server.

server-side: Something that runs on the web server, as opposed to running inside your browser several thousand miles away. A server-side process belongs to the web server or to the web host, or to a particular web site and its results are sent out on the wire to clients that make requests.

session: A logically related set of operations. This is kind of vague, but think about buying a book online. You go to the web site, find the page describing the book, add it to your shopping cart, then check out and have your credit card charged before you sign off. This is a session. Sessions are a special case made possible by cookies, which the web site uses to remember you. Normally when you access a web page the web site forgets all about you as soon as it sends you the page you ask for, but sessions fix that.

site map: A separate web page (or part of one) that shows an outline of everything that the web site offers. It’s like a table of contents.

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol): Probably the most common communication standard for sending email.

spam: Unwelcome and often repetitive email messages. The name comes from a Monty Python skit about food. Care to guess which food that was?

SQL (Structured Query Language): A computer language specifically designed for accessing and manipulating data within databases.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer): An encryption protocol that enables secure communication across the internet, while also preventing eavesdropping, tampering, and forgery. A URL starting with “https://” (notice the “s”) indicates an SSL connection.

static site: One that presents the same content to all users all the time. Content changes only when new files are uploaded by the owner.

subdomain: A domain within a domain. A subdivision of a larger domain, usually created to identify a specific section of a web site. Given the domain “www.foobar.com,” the oink subdomain would have a URL of “oink.foobar.com”. In case you want something else to think about, note that “www” is also a subdomain. Try not to be confused. Just do it.

TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol): A set of standards allowing two computers to communicate over a network. The TCP protocol handles basic connections and the IP protocol manages data. Data is broken into chunks called packets and sent. Packets are then reassembled at the other end. Each packet can be somewhere between 40 and 32000 bytes long.

upload: A vague term for moving files from one computer to another. Generally an upload is from a smaller computer or a desktop computer to a server or mainframe or network. Download is the opposite of this.

uptime: If a website is accessible, it is up. Uptime is the percent of time that a site is up.

URI (Uniform Resource Identifier): A term used to identify resources on the internet. A URL is one type of URI.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator): An address to a document on the internet. This may be a web page or part of one. A URL has three parts: Protocol, domain name and path name. The protocol is the communication method to use. The domain name uniquely identifies a web site. The path name tells which file to retrieve from the domain. This file is usually a web page. For example, given a URL like “http://www.foo.com/index.html,” the protocol to use is HTTP, or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. This determines how web browsers and web servers talk to each other. The domain name is “www.foo.com”, which identifies which web server to contact, and which web site on it. The path name in this example is “index.html,” which is a specific file representing a web page.

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium): An international organization that develops specifications, guidelines, software, and tools for the web. In case you were wondering, some areas the W3C is involved in are: Accessibility, Amaya, CC/PP, Compound Document Formats (CDF), CSS, CSS Validator, Databinding, DOM, Efficient XML Interchange, eGovernment, GRDDL, Health Care and Life Sciences, HTML, HTML Tidy, HTML Validator, HTTP, Incubator, InkML, Internationalization, Jigsaw, Libwww, MathML, Mobile Web Initiative (W3C-MWI), Multimodal Interaction, OWL, Patent Policy, PICS, PNG, POWDER, Privacy and P3P, RDF, Rich Web Clients, Rules, Security, Semantic Web, Service Modeling Language (SML), SMIL, SOAP/XMLP, SOAP-JMS, SPARQL, Style, SVG, TAG, Timed Text, URI/URL, Validators, Voice, Ubiquitous Web Applications, WAI, Web API, Web Application Formats, Web Architecture (TAG), WebCGM, Web Services, WS-Addressing, WS-CDL, WSDL, WS-Policy, XForms, XHTML, XHTML2, XLink, XML, XML Base, XML Encryption, XML Key Management, XML Processing, XML Query, XML Schema, XML Signature, XPath, XPointer, XSL and XSLT.

web address: The same as a URL or URI.

web client: A software program used to access web pages. This may be a web browser but could be something else.

web document: One formatted for distribution over the web. The formatting is usually done with a markup language like HTML or XML. PDF files also qualify. Microsoft Word documents do not, because they can’t be displayed by web browsers, though all too many businesses and government agencies ignorantly and arrogantly post Word documents anyway.

web server: A computer or software application (or usually a combination of both) that delivers services or information across the internet. The recipient is most often a web browser.

web service: Software application running on a web server. The server uses standard communication protocols to “serve them up”, most often to web browsers. A web service is more intricate than a web page. It could be an online spreadsheet, or something that just communicates with other software without human intervention.

web site: A collection of computer files generally formatted into HTML documents which may contain text, images, sound and video. The organization is usually hierarchical, from the main page to second level pages, to third level pages, and so on. You can also think of a web site as a location on the Web. The URL associated with the site points to it, usually to the site’s “home” or main page.

web hosting types: (1) Shared hosting (also called virtual web hosting). This is the most common and cheapest option. Multiple web sites share the hardware and software resources of a single server platform. You get service at a discount in exchange for constraints on bandwidth, disk space, data transfer speeds, security and privacy. Your site may become sluggish at peak times because of other web sites running on the same platform. You also cannot tune server settings independently of other customers. (2) Virtual private server hosting. This is a pumped up form of shared hosting. Each web site gets a guaranteed share of resources. (3) Dedicated hosting. You lease or buy an entire server, don’t share it with anyone, and manage it yourself. You get unlimited access to your server’s hardware and software, high performance, and full control, but your job is more complex and your costs are higher. You may also have your own data center and staff, own the equipment and software, and serve as your own hosting company. (4) Managed hosting. This is the same as dedicated hosting, but with a hosting company providing services such as consulting, administration, support, security, testing and troubleshooting. This allows you to get by more cheaply than you could in-house, since you pay one price to rent hardware, software and services rather than buying equipment and software, and hiring your own staff. (5) Colocation hosting. You buy your own server but locate it at a service provider’s data center. They provide connectivity, uninterruptible power, a controlled physical environment, and building security. You get flexibility in choosing your own hardware and software, and you are still responsible for buying and maintaining your own server. You also pay for your own server insurance, and for space, bandwidth, and other services you get from your colocation provider. (6) Reseller hosting. One account owner contracts for server resources from a hosting company at wholesale and then resells hosting to others at retail, normally providing customized service and support as part of the deal.

web hosting: The process of storing a web site on a computer and making it available on demand across the world wide web. Hosting requires high performance computers with big hard drives located in secure facilities. The stored web sites need to be reachable through registered domain names, and the files for each web site need to be in the correct formats. The hosting company makes sure that the files they get from you are kept safe and are available on demand.

web server: This can refer a computer program that manages and returns web pages on request, or the computer that runs that program and holds the files for one or more web sites, or both.

web-based email: An email application that allows access from any computer that has an internet connection.

wiki: A web site encouraging collaborative creation, editing, and organizing of content using nothing more than a web browser. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is probably the best known site of this type. Wikis are usually like giant reference books that continuously evolve. Ward Cunningham created the first one and named it WikiWikiWeb after small fast buses in Hawaii (“wiki wiki” means “quick quick”). Cunningham’s intent was to make “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.

Windows hosting: Uses Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) on top of the Windows operating system.

XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Mark-up Language): A hybrid of XML and HTML, and a superset of HTML. More flexible than plain old HTML.

XML (Extensible Markup Language): A simpler variant of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language, the super-superset of markup languages) designed expressly for web documents and data exchange, and developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

zip: A format for compressing computer files so that they take up less disk space and are easier to send across the internet.

Copyright © 2008 by Dave Sailer