Glossary of Terms

AJAX is an acronym for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Using JavaScript on a website allows for complete control over the display and offers functionality like that of PHP, but it is running directly on the computer it is being viewed on. Using AJAX a website can offer a wide range of interactive functionality without needing to reload an entire HTML page; JavaScript can access information from the internet and display it directly in the current page, even replacing or removing entirely other content.

The BMP image file format provides for digital storage of lossless raster graphics.

A type of test used mostly for interaction with a website designed to tell humans apart from computers. Since the ability for software has grown it often can present problems in situations where any input is made available online, developers can create robots to fill out forms automatically and with impressive speeds. This circumvention of actual human input often creates massive problems for the service provider, forcing the use of a Captcha to test the authenticity of the input. Usually a Captcha can be recognized as an image containing somewhat distorted string of words or letters. The term CAPTCHA is a contrived acronym which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”

A technique used in user interface design, usually index cards are used with interface elements are created and then sorted by a collective of people to reach an agreement about certain organization and/or importance of the elements.

Cascading Style Sheets is a language developed to allow for efficient and flexible content display and user interface creation and interaction. At the most advanced levels CSS processing of an XML or XHTML document allows for very advanced search based selection of certain elements and can control color, size, border, fonts, and more. In most versions CSS also allows for specific direction for hover and other states triggered by the mouse etc.

An acronym for “Common Gateway Interface”, CGI is a standard which allows a web server to generate web pages using a programming language as opposed to simply displaying a static document. CGI is used in the creation of interactive sites by allowing for user input and other programmable data to effect the outcome of a generated page. This is configured on the web server and includes the usage of one or more programming languages (e.g. PHP). The use of CGI began mostly as an extension to an otherwise static set of documents like HTML, today it is more common to see a page generated using these methods than not.

A content management system is generally a software package that manages documents and multimedia. Many varying website software packages are available under Open Source license, like WordPress, Joomla, or Magento.

Written text is often called copy in both the advertising and publishing industries.

These terms come from the editing of paper where people literally cut and paste material from one location to another, using scissors to literally cut out a portion and glue it somewhere else. This ability has been a part of software on a computer since the shift from punch-cards in the late 1960′s. On computers today the functions are often associated by the popularly accepted norm in keyboard-shortcuts (Windows: ctrl+x, ctrl+c, and ctrl+v. Mac: Command-x, Command-c, Command-v.)

In computers execution refers to the process by which a machine caries out the instructions of a program (these instructions are often called programming language or code). The term run is used almost synonymously and both terms (execute and run) often refer to the action of a user invoking or launching a computer program.

A hallway page is one page of a website generally created as a landing page for users and search engines to find other important pages or websites; see doorway pages.

On a computer or similar device any text with special references called hyperlinks used by the reader to immediately access other texts. The term HyperText was coined by Ted Nelson.

The hyper-text markup language is a computer software technology designed to allow for simple formatting of documents in an open system. The standard allows for a determined number of tags, most of which are able to wrap around, or nest other items, creating a tree like structure that allows for creating documents with great flexibility.

The hyper-text transfer protocol is the network based software mechanism used for transmitting data of varying types over the internet. It and variations upon this system account for all of website communications from the end-user to the server.

Among the several image formats available on computers is the JPEG format (normally shortened to JPG.) The image format was named Joint Photographic Experts Group after the name of the company which created it. The file format has become widely known for it's high quality image produced with a relatively low file size, along with a wide range of compression options. JPEG is a lossy image format, as opposed to the PNG format.

A computer operating system, found on many web servers on the internet. Linux was developed on top of Unix which was built from the ground up around scalability and networking.

A system of instructions and data which can be directly executed by a CPU which can also be called machine code and assembly.

Computer software that is made available (code and license) for use in other projects, in general open source licenses require that future adaptations and borrowed pieces remain open source and freely available. See GPL and Creative Commons.

In SEO "pagejacking" is a term which describes the act (usually nefarious) of copying the content from one website to another in order to acquire similar search engine rankings for similar keywords. This is often used in techniques which attempt to lure in the traffic expecting the original site and the information of these user's can tracked and utilized without consent.

Image files on computers come in many formats, one of them is the PNG format. The format was initially released in 1996 and has come into favorable use by many website designers by 2010. The PNG format is a raster type image format that was created with the intention of improving upon the GIF image file format.

Most typically this term is used to describe website layout design which augments itself appropriately depending on the user, specifically the browser/device they are using at the time (or sometimes how wide the browser window is let's say.) Be sure to read the entire wonderful ALA article about responsive design. This term is related to the architectural and artistic installations which in a weird way "interact" with people or other things around them using cameras or other sensors. Now in web and other software development and design, this term can widely refer to all of these sorts of visual or functional augmentation of the system depending on various data received during the time of use.

Many various software packages can connect users together by transmitting a live image of one person's screen. This software often allows the sharing user to offer control over the keyboard and/or mouse, generally for the purpose of providing help or to provide a demonstration. Some of the software available providing some or all of these features are Skype, LogMeIn, GoToMeeting, and TeamViewer.

A “scripting language” (also script language or extension language) is a programming language that allows control of one or more software applications. Usage of a scripting language often signifies a different approached used by a computer to translate the software into “machine code”: Typically software is compiled by the developer before being installed or delivered, where as a scripting language commonly requires the end-user or a server computer to include an interpreter which converts the script into machine code each time it is run.

Online advertising using direct paid listings of links, banners, video, etc. Search engine marketing, or SEM specifically refers to direct paid listings with search engine providers, however the exact line between a search engine and any other website continues to lack a true definition.

The term search engine optimization, or SEO, refers to the process of increasing the performance of a websites ranking within one or more online search engine services. There are many techniques and tools used as described below....

User experience is a subject that deals how a person interacting with a machine is affected, what their feelings are and how it might change them in any way.When developing anything, a product, a service, what have you; It starts with building something and releasing it to some users, then you can begin watching and seeing the interactions taking place from your perspective, and finally you can begin to ask the users questions about how it is all going along: This final step deals with user experience directly and the knowledge gathered is very important during every other stage.

The point at which people (users) interact with a machine.

Voice over IP is a telephone like service that connects voice conversations using internet based networks as opposed to telephone equipment based networks. Services such as Skype offer free direct communication using VoIP.

A set of guidelines published by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. WCAG is an acronym for Web Content AccessibilityGuidelines and serve to provide standards and best-practices in the creation of content which is accessible to impaired users, such as those with limited eye-vision or hearing.

The terms "web page", "web site", "website" and more have been used interchangeably for some time, leading to confusion about these terms. In general a web page refers to one actual displayed region of any number of other pages displayed on the same or other domains.

A web site refers to an entire organized region of a collection of web pages, each individual page often linking to other areas of the same site and using similar if not identical user interface layout and visual components.

A system of interlinked documents accessed via the internet; the World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW and commonly referenced as the Web) was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee as an example of his and Robert Cailliau’s proposition for using “HyperText [...] to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will."

Websites are available on the HTTP protocol under an optional prefix of WWW. In later years after the growth of the system of websites known as the World Wide Web, the creator Tim Berners Lee has stated that in hind-sight this prefix was and is not necessary.

This term is somewhat unofficial since it has gone through many changes and can refer to other unrelated meanings. When you want to zip something to someone, you may be talking about sending something very fast, or just sending it at any speed. However in the computer world ZIP has come to be known as at least two different major parts of using computer files, one has gone out of practice while the other remains still. If you need to compress a file there are many options, of them is the standard ZIP compression system. Technically one or more files or folders can be archived into a ZIP file without compression, however in most cases the archive file is compressed to save on storage space and bandwidth usage. ZIP file compression and decompression software is readily available on most user computers and is universally used for communicating files, especially when they are large in size or are very complex file/folder structures.