Glossary

Glossary of 187 terms

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Accessibility - Accessibility is a general term used to describe facilities or amenities to assist people with disabilities. In terms of the World Wide Web, this means making the content of a website accessible to people with a disability, so that such people can enjoy the same level of access as those without disabilities. It also means making a website available to alternative devices, such as Personal Data Assistants (PDA's), mobile phones, and web enabled television applications.

ActiveX - A programming interface (API) that allows web browsers to download and execute Windows programs.

ADO (ActiveX Data Object) - A Microsoft technology that provides data access to any kind of data store.

ADSL - "Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line". A fast and reliable way to access the Internet. ADSL is faster than a 56 Kbps modem, faster than ISDN, and can be faster than a cable connection.

Amaya - An open source web browser editor from W3C, used to push leading-edge ideas in browser design.

Anchor - The starting point or ending point of a hyperlink.

Animation - A set of pictures simulating movement when played in series.

ANSI (American National Standards Institute) - An organization that creates standards for the computer industry. Responsible for the ANSI C standard.

ANSI C - An international standard for the C programming language.

Apache - An open source web server. Mostly for Unix, Linux and Solaris platforms.

Apache web server - Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April of 1996. Apache is the most widely used web servers. Apache HTTP Server is an open source HTTP web server for Unix platforms (BSD, GNU/Linux, and UNIX systems), Microsoft Windows, and other platforms. The Apache HTTP Server is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation.

API (Application Programming Interface) - An interface for letting a program communicate with another program. In web terms: An interface for letting web browsers or web servers communicate with other programs.

ARPAnet - The experimental network tested in the 1970's which started the development of the Internet.

ASCII - American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Accepted method for describing text in computer systems.

ASF - (Advanced Streaming Format) A multimedia streaming format. Developed by Microsoft for Windows Media.

ASP - Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsofts server-side technology for dynamically-generated web pages. Programming ASP websites is made easier by various built-in objects, such as a cookie-based session object that maintains variables from page to page.

Attachment - A file ‘attached’ or added to an e-mail message. Such a file is usually displayed as an icon with the email message which the recipient can then click on in order to save it or display its contents.

Authentication - In web terms: the method used to verify the identity of a user, program or computer on the web.

AVI - (Audio Video Interleave) File format for video files. Video compression technology developed by Microsoft.