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".