Contents | Section 4

Glossary


Anchor
A marker locating the starting position (or ending position) of a hypermedia link.

Archie
A network service that searches FTP sites for files.

Browser
A program which acts as a front-end to the web, sending requests to servers and displaying information to users.

CERN
The European collective of high-energy physics researchers located in Geneva, Switzerland. The web was first developed at CERN. They have since received several major grants for new physics experiments and discontinued their work on the web, handing their web projects over to a French based company.

Client
A computer or program that requests a service of another computer or program, which is the server.

Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
A standard interface between web servers and programs written to generate responses to client requests. Web-based Searching, email, and on-line ordering all use CGI-based programs.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
File Transfer Protocol is a program (and protocol) for transferring files between machines on the Internet.

Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)
Graphics Interchange Format is a standard graphics format used widely on the web.

Gopher
A menu-based Internet information distribution system created by the University of Minnesota (their school mascot is a gopher).

Horizontal Rule
A horizontal line displayed when the <HR> tag is processed by a web browser. Often used to divide sections of a HTML document.

Host
A computer attached to the Internet that provides information or services to other computers attached to the Internet.

Hypertext
A document that contains links to other documents, which are indicated by special text. When the links are selected the viewer connects the user to the referenced documents.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
HyperText Markup Language is the set of tags that are added to an ASCII file to produce a hypertext document as seen through an HTML browser.
HTML is the standard language used to format documents on the World Wide Web, the current version standard is 2.0.

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
HyperText Transfer Protocol is the computer communications protocol used to transfer HyperText documents from servers to clients on the Internet.

Home Page
This can have two meanings depending on the context. A person can have a "personal home page" which usually describes themselves and/or their work. Also, a server can have a "home page" which is usually the first document in the document tree. This document can describe the server or the services it provides as well as links to those services. However it is not necessary to start here, since you can get any document anywhere on the Internet if you have its URL.

Internet Address
A unique address assigned to each machine on the Internet.

Internet
The Internet is a worldwide collection of regional and national computer networks. Computers on these networks are able to communicate and share information with one another by sending data across the Internet. Internet is also used to refer to the host of services which are available by computers on the Internet, such as Gopher, FTP, WWW, WAIS, and more.

JPEG
Joint Photographic Experts Group: a graphic file format that is used commonly with photographs and other complex images.

Mosaic
Mosaic is the name for one of the most popular web client programs. Mosaic is produced and distributed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Mosaic currently comes in three flavors, one for X-Windows machines, one for Macintosh, and one for MS-Windows machines.

Mozilla
The name of Netscape Communication Corps mascot. (see Netscape Navigator)

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
A federally-funded organization whose mission is to develop and research high-technology resources for the scientific community. It is located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is responsible for the creation and distribution of the Mosaic web client software.

Network
A widely used term referring to physically separated computers that can communicate with each other with special hardware and software.

NNTP
Network News Transfer Protocol. A common method by which articles over Usenet are transferred.

National Science Foundation (NSF)
A federally-funded organization that manages the NSFnet, which connects most major research institution and campus in the United States.

Netscape Navigator
A web interface program created by Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape implements several creative features that NCSA Mosaic and others do not. Because of its features and speed Netscape holds about 75% of the web client market. You may see Netscape Navigator referred to as Mozilla (Netscape Corps mascot).

Packet
When information is transferred between two computers on the Internet it is broken into many small pieces that are sent individually by the sender and then reconstructed into the original information by the receiver. The individual pieces are called packets.

Server
A server is half of a client-server arrangement of computers.
In a client-server system, the server provides a service (whether it's e-mail, file storage, or serving WWW files) and the client is a machine which accesses that service.

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)
Standard Generalized Markup Language is perhaps best be thought of as a programming language for text formatting. HTML is a type of Standard Generalized Markup Language.

Telnet
Telnet is a program (and protocol) that allows you to log into and interact with a remote machine on the Internet. Telnet allows your computer to act as a terminal on the remote computer.
(Telnet effectively allows your $2000 Pentium PC to act as if it were a $100 terminal with the brain the size of a pea.)

Terabyte
A unit of data measurement equal to 1,099,511,627,776 bytes (1,048,576 megabytes).

Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
TCP/IP is the basic communication protocol that all computers on the Internet use to speak to each other. All other protocols such as HTTP, FTP, and Gopher are built on top of TCP/IP.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
URLs are a way of specifying any document that is part of the World Wide Web. They are a simple method of defining the type and location of a resource anywhere in the world with a consistent format.
The syntax of the URL is:
service://host.domain:port/path/to/file/filename
Examples:
http://www.dsu.edu/projects/madison/index.html
gopher://alpha.dsu.edu:70/00/gopher-faq
ftp://ftp.cica.indiana.edu/pub/pc/win3/desktop/
wais://austin.apple.com/
telnet://alpha.dsu.edu
news:alt.music.nirvava

USENET
A popular text based set of discussion groups.
Here at DSU, you can access USENET by selecting Trumpet under the Communications group in the network menu. Note that many web browsers such as NCSA Mosaic and Netscape can be used to access USENET.

Veronica
A network service that allows users to search Gopher systems for documents.

Wide Area Information Service (WAIS)
Wide Area Information Service is a service which allows users to intelligently search for information among databases distributed throughout the Internet. WAIS was invented by Brewster Kahle and released by Thinking Machines Corporation in 1991.

World-Wide Web (WWW or W3)
The World-Wide Web is a virtual network of computers using special hypermedia documents to distribute information. This information is formatted so that it can be accessed by different client computers worldwide. You'll also see the World Wide Web referred to as "Web" and "W3".