User Note #601

Glossary of Internet Terms

Add-ons
General term which can mean anything from players, and other multimedia additions to Web clients. Some examples of "browser add-ons" are RealAudio, Shockwave, VDO Live, etc. See also Viewers.

Article or Item (relating to Newsgroups)
A message written by a Usenet News user and posted to the network. Articles are similar to electronic mail messages, but are not private. You first locate the Newsgroup that interests you, read the flow of the discussion, and then join in by "posting an article". If you would rather send a private message, then you would "reply by email" instead. Articles are intended to be seen by potentially hundreds of thousands of people around the world, so confidential or private information about you, should not be "posted" on a Newsgroup. Also called "postings".

Article Number (relating to Newsgroups)
For each article in a group article-list window, an article number is shown. This is the number used by your news server to track the article. This number is local to your news server only. This number is not a meaningful identifier outside of your news server. If you need a globally (internet-wide) unique identifer for an article, use its message ID.

Bulletin Board System (BBS)
An electronic system in which users participate in discussions by leaving public messages for each other. Most BBS's are run on personal computers and are accessible only by dialup modem. Very few BBS's have been converted to run on the Internet. Many BBS's have special features, such as on-line text-based games and a file repository, but most of these features can be duplicated on the Internet now, so the popularity of the BBS has dwindled.

Browser
Software that allows users to access and browse the World Wide Web. Clients can display HTML pages in their desired format. Formally called Clients. This is also known as a Graphical Browser because all of the information that comes into the browser in text form, is converted into fonts and pictures, and then displayed.

Bulleted List
List of items on a Web page, separated by large dots known as bullets

CERN
The European Laboratory for Particle Physics, where the World Wide Web project originated in 1989.

Clickable Map
Informal name for Imagemap, which is a graphical page that has hotspots, or sensitive areas which represent links to other web pages. This addition to a web server, allows you to create an array of buttons that are actually one graphic file, with different sections of the graphic linked to other pages.

Client
A term used to represent a software program used to talk to a server. Programs written for Microsoft Windows, which provide you access to the Internet, are all Windows-based client programs.

Cross Reference (relating to Windows Help Files)
A type of hypertext link in Microsoft Help. A cross reference is a topic that appears in the Help window when you click on a term that appears in Help as green solid underlined text.

Definition (relating to Windows Help Files)
A type of hypertext link in Microsoft Help. A definition is a (usually) brief description of a term. Definitions appear when you press and hold the mouse button on a term that appears in Help as green text marked with a dotted underline.

The description disappears as soon as you release the mouse button. Hence, it is not possible to access hypertext links within a definition. Some definitions contain hypertext links, however, because they are also available as cross-references. It is usually possible to reference a definition as a cross-reference via the Help Search button.

DNS
Domain Name Service. Every machine on the Internet has its own unique I.P. address. Whenever you go to a particular machine, you connect to it via a user-friendly name such as www.xyz.org. The Name Server's job is to look up the I.P. address of the friendly name that you give it. Once the lookup has been performed, the number is returned to your computer, and your software then goes directly to that site.

It's somewhat like a phone book. You know the name of the person that you want to call, but that won't help if you don't know the number. You can look in the phone book, and get the number that you are wish to dial, and then you can dial the number, and talk to that person. DNS does the same thing. Telephones work on unique telephone numbers, and the Internet works with unique I.P. numbers.

Document
General term for anything that appears in the main window of a Web client. More specifically, a Web document is an HTML document that the client displays in a graphic form.

Electronic Mail Message
A message sent privately to one or more explicitly-named individuals. Electronic mail messages are not the same as news articles. However, many news readers provide the capability of sending (but usually not receiving) electronic mail because it is often desirable to respond privately to an article.

FAQ
FAQ is an acronym for "Frequently Asked Questions". A FAQ is typically a text on one subject organized as a list of common questions related to the subject and the answers. FAQ's on many subjects are frequently posted to the newsgroup news.answers. You can also use your Web browser, or FTP client to access the site: ftp://ftp.rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group, which maintains the FAQ's for most newsgroups.

Fill-in Forms
Specially designed section of HTML document that accepts input from users; typically used for user feedback, product ordering, or document searching. These are the areas on a web page that have text boxes, radio buttons, check boxes and at the end of the form, you'll find a "submit" or "send form" button, to tell the web server that you have completed your input process.

Firewall
Areas of a computer file system protected against unwanted access by outside users. These programs watch all of the traffic that requests entry into your local area network (LAN). If a packet comes across that is from a computer system unknown to the firewall, the packet is rejected. This is usually only found inside a company-wide LAN, as opposed to a Dial-Up connection (although your service provider may have a firewall on their LAN which will work the same way).

Formatted Text
Text included on a Web page that was formatted by another type of computer program (i.e. is not in HTML format), and is displayed by the Web client in that original format. This is usually displayed in a non-proportional font such as Courier, and is generally used to keep the original formatting in tact.

Forms
Shortened version of fill-in forms

FTP
File Transfer Protocol, a means to exchange files across a network. The set of all resources accessible through publicly-available file transfer protocol sites is sometimes referred to as FTP space. Most all web browsers support the FTP protocol, as well as some stand alone clients such as WS_FTP, or Cute FTP, which that is their only function. A web browser is good for occasional FTP transfers, but if you find yourself transferring several megabytes of data, a specialized program will probably suit your purposes better.

Gateway
Most computers are interconnected to each other on a small network. However, usually one machine provides the link to the outside world or other networks. This "Gateway" computer is usually responsible for providing security to the local network to protect it from intrusions from the outside world. This is the computer where a firewall resides. When a computer requests information from a computer located outside the local network, it is up to the gateway to route that information to the outside world, and be a conduit for the return of the information back to the computer that originally requested it.

Gopher
An often overlooked means for disseminating or discovering resources on the Internet through a text-based menu interface. Menu items can be links to other documents, search utilities, or information services. The set of all resources publicly accessible through the Internet Gopher protocol is sometimes referred to as Gopher space. Most companies that had previously published most of their information through Gopher, are now making the switch to the WWW.

Graphical Browser
A client program which is used to view the text-based resources of Gopher space. Most web browsers are capable of displaying information, so the need for a separate Gopher client are limited at best.

Graphics file
Almost every web page you visit will have graphics associated with it. These graphics, or pictures, are separate files which are linked through HTML tags in the web page themselves. There are quite a few different graphics file formats, some of these are listed in the section "Graphic File Formats"

Graphics file formats
The following lists some of the various graphic file formats that are commonly used today:

TIFF, JPEG , JFIF, PCX, TGA, PNG, DCX, 2D, CALS, IFF, IOCA, PCD, IGF, ICO, MO:DCA, WMF, PCT, EPS, GIF, ATT, BMP, BRK, CLP, LV, GX2, IMG, IMT, KFX, RLE, MAC, MSP, NCR, PBM, PGM, SUN, PNM, PPM, PSD, RAS, SGI, WPG, XBM, XPM, XWD

The three you are most likely to come in contact with on the Internet are:

GIF and JPG. These formats are the type of graphics associated with most web pages.

Header
A series of lines at the beginning of an article or electronic mail message that contain such information as the article's or message's author, its subject, its date and time of transmission, and so on. The header is separated from the actual text of the article or message by a blank line.

Heading
An emphasized line or section in an HTML document. Several heading styles are available, ranging form <H1> (the largest) to <H6> (the smallest).

Home Page
For a company, this refers to the main entry point for the rest of their web site. For an individual, it has become a way of referring to your own personal web page on the Internet. In either case, it is usually the starting point that most people will begin navigating from.

Hotspot (relating to Windows Help Files)
A region within the display of hypertext or a graphics page that, when selected, links the user to another point in the hypertext or to another (possibly nonhypertext) resource.

HTML
HyperText Markup Language: the "language" used to create Web pages for the WWW. HTML a tag based language, which works on the principal of Set and Unset regions. For examlple, to turn on a bold headline font, you would do the following:

<CENTER><H1>This is a headline font</H1></CENTER> results in:

This is a headline font

At the end of the line, notice the </H1> and the </CENTER>. The / before the command instructs the browser to stop displaying the text in the headline font, and stop centering the text on the page. In order to get the desired effect, you would need to set and unset the various commands to suit your purposes.

Web clients display HTML pages according to their coded format, and quickly and efficiently "parse" or read through the HTML, and convert it into nice looking pages with varying fonts and graphics.

Fortunately, due to many WYSIWYG programs out there that can be used to edit web pages, the days of having to learn the foreign language of HTML are beginning to dwindle.

HTTP
HyperText Transfer Protocol: the Web's primary protocol, HTTP performs the request and retrieve functions necessary to display documents stored on remote computers.

Hyperlink
A hypertext link appearing as a number of a highlight in a client's main window. This can be any region that you can click on in order to navigate to a different page, or to a completely different computer's web server.

Imagemaps
Formal name for clickable maps: imagemaps are graphic elements that have embedded into them two or more hyperlinks, each hyperlink offering an individual jump to a linked document. Frequently imagemaps are in fact maps, but they can appear as any graphic.

Inline Image
Graphic that appears as part of the Web page: inline images are coded into Web documents through the HTML language, and load with the Web page itself. In most Web clients, inline images can be delayed or toggled off to improve retrieval speed.

Internet
A cooperatively-run, globally distributed collection of computer networks that exchange information via a common set of rules for exchanging data (the TCP/IP protocol suite)

Intranet
Used to describe a inner-company network which uses Internet technology on a company-wide basis, rather than a global scale. Many large scale businesses maintain their in-house documentation online, using a company Web Server

Jump
The act of retrieving a new document as the result of selecting a hyperlink. The term "jump" is used because the user is often accessing a new computer somewhere in the world, but no actual leaping about takes place, except for a change in URL addresses.

Link
A reference to another Web document, or another section of the same Web document. Links are typically highlighted when displayed in Web clients

MAPI
Microsoft Mail Application Programmer's Interface. Allows communication between News Programs and Microsoft Mail.

The Matrix
The set of all networks that can exchange electronic mail either directly or through mail gateways. This term was coined by John S. Quaterman in his book The Matrix (Digital Press, 1990)

Message-Id
Every news and mail message sent over the Internet has an absolutely unique message identifier. The identifier is contained inside angle brackets and typically looks something like <uniquenum@full.domain.host>. i.e. <91028938183.bba3@titan.ksc.nasa.gov>.

MIME
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions - an international standard for the exchange of text

and binary files in Internet messages. It is presented in Internet Standard RFC-1341 by Nathaniel Borenstein and Ned Freed, June 1992.

Mosaic
Short-form for NCSA Mosaic or a licensed version distributed commercially. This has also sometimes been a reference to the Web in the same vein that making a photocopy of a document was referred to as "making a Xerox copy"

Multimedia
General term for the integration of text, graphics, sound, animation, video, and communications technologies

Navigation
The act of traversing the Web, or of moving among linked documents on a variety of computers. Navigation is a central topic in discussions of hypertext system, because of the problem of getting "lost in hyperspace." Web clients typically offer navigation histories to help users find their way back along their hyperlink paths.

NCSA
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Developers and distributors of NCSA Mosaic.

NCSA Mosaic
At one time, it was the most popular graphical Web client and it is available for X Windows, Macintosh and Microsoft Windows systems. It has been licensed to several companies for commercial release.

The Net
An informal term for the Internet or some subset of The Matrix, with its specific meaning defined by the context of use. For example, a computerized conference via email takes place on a BITNET host that has an Internet gateway, making the conference available to anyone on either of these networks. In this case, the developer might say, "Our conference will be available on the Net."

Newsgroup
A collection of articles on a given topic. When you write an article, you specify to which group or groups it should be sent.

Each newsgroup has a hierarchical name which suggests the topic of that group. Names consist of several words separated by periods. The first word in the newsgroup name states the general category covered by that group; the second, a sub category of that general category, and so on.

For instance, the newsgroups rec.aviation.owning and rec.cooking are recreation-oriented groups which are dedicated to owning an airplane, and cooking/recipes. soc.culture.europe is a sociologically-oriented group devoted to the culture of Europe, etc.

News Manager
The person or person's responsible for running the news feed at each site. They define the type of newsgroups received by each site and determine whether news from particular newsgroups is transmitted to other sites. Based on local system resources, your news manager also determines how many days of news traffic can be kept for each newsgroup.

Newsreader
A computer program through which you interact with the Usenet News system. News readers allow you to select and read articles written by others, and to write and post articles of your own. A number of news readers have been written over the years, many of them for computers running the UNIX operating system. The best-known news readers are probably rn, vn, nn, and xrn.

News Server
A computer that runs special software to exchange news articles with other computers in the Usenet network, and makes these articles available to local users. News readers require access to a news server, but they do not require you to have an account on a news server.

NNTP
Network News Transport Protocol. This is the network protocol used by most newsreaders to carry Usenet News information. There is also a program named wNNTP that implements the NNTP protocol and runs on many news servers. (The program NNTP has been replaced by the program INN at many sites.) NNTP is defined in RFC-977.

Numbered List
List of items on a Web page, separated by numbers

Page
HTML document displayed in a client's main window; completely undefined parameters, but typically a Web page is about 40-60 lines in length including inline graphics

Player
Software program capable of displaying sound or video files retrieved through a Web client. Players are separate programs from clients, with their functions and file associations specified in the client's configuration system.

Site
File section of a computer on which Web documents reside. Typically used to refer to the specific organization that controls these documents (e.g. The Centerline Computers site, AT&T site, IBM site, etc.)

SMTP
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. This is the network protocol used for the exchange of electronic mail messages on the Internet. SMTP is defined in RFC-821.

Sound File
Computer file containing digitized sound; can be retrieved by a Web client but can be heard only through player software associated or linked to the client

Surfing
The act of navigating the Web, typically used to denote jumping (see "jump") from page to page, using techniques to rapidly process (or disregard most) content in order to locate subjectively-valuable or interesting resources.

RFC
Request For Comment. This is the common forum for presenting proposals for standards and protocols to the Internet community. RFC's of interest to news/mail enthusiasts include 821 (SMTP), 822 (Mail Messages), 977 (NNTP), 1036 (Usenet Messages), 1341 (MIME).

ROT13
ROT13 is a very simple encryption mechanism for text. Imagine the 26 characters of the alphabet on a wheel. To ROT13 encrypt one character, simply rotate the wheel 13 positions from the original character position. To decrypt, turn the wheel another 13 positions. The purpose of ROT13 is not really encryption, but rather to shield the casual reader from potentially offensive material, or from what people call "spoilers" - i.e. giving away the end of a movie.

Posting
The act of sending an article to the Usenet network, to be seen by potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals. Also, a synonym for "article".

Reference
Each news article contains a computer generated reference message-Id which makes an article unique. This identifier looks something like <1996Sep21.202839.25199@news.centercom.com>.

Identifiers may appear a number of times in an article when someone quotes or references another article.

Signature
A short piece of text appended to a posting or mail message typically describing the author and his/her interests and affiliation. It's considered bad form for the signature to be more than four lines.

Text-Based Browser
Web client used by text terminals, typically UNIX-based, although there have been a few MS-DOS based

Threads
A way of organizing and displaying the sequence of articles that make up a conversation. The News protocol and many news readers have built-in support for this mode of operation. Most news readers have direct support for threading if you have the "Compute Threads" option enabled from the Config Miscellaneous menu. You can also use "poor man's threading" by moving to the next article on the same subject with the "Find Next Article Same Subject" menu command. There is also a hypertext support of accessing news reference headers.

URL
Uniform Resource Locator, the addressing system for Web documents

Usenet
A system for disseminating text discussion among cooperating computer hosts. A Usenet newsgroup is a forum for discussing a particular subject, topic, or subtopic. Usenet is not a network nor is it limited to distribution on the Internet, but is disseminated widely throughout the Matrix and beyond.

Video File
A Computer file consisting of digitized video; can be retrieved by a Web client but can only be viewed through a player or viewer associated with the client.

Viewer
Software program capable of displaying graphics or video files retrieved through a Web client. Viewers are separate programs from clients, their functions and file associations specified in the client's configuration system.

web
A set of hypertext pages related to a particular topic or which may be located on a single host; a subset of the Web.

Web
Common short-form for the World Wide Web

Web Server
Computer on which Web documents reside, and which HTTP software to permit Web transactions.

World Wide Web
Distributed hypermedia system originating at CERN in 1989

WWW
The World Wide Web

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