Internet Jargon...

What is an ISP...

Internet Service Provider

A computer network that connects millions of computers globally and provides world-wide communications to business and homes.

What is www...

World Wide Web: A subset of the Internet that combines graphics, text, sound and animation into a rich communications medium.

What is URL...

Uniform Resource Locator: gives the location of a file or service on the web.

Areas on a web page that are labelled or change when the cursor moves over them and move the user to a new page when the mouse is clicked.

What is a Domain Name...

Domain names are essentially a human way of allowing the Internet to work. Every single computer that exists on the Internet is given a number to identify itself (an "IP address" such as 195.102.142.131). Within this sequence of numbers is also a way of finding out who else is in your "group" and where to find other "groups" but that's starting to get a bit complex for our needs here.

In general, this is great for computers because they love numbers and can therefore associate IP addresses with other computers very easily. Unfortunately, Humans are not as good at handling numbers so easily and prefer nice sensible names.

The techie boffins who developed the Internet that we know today, created a system of matching a name with a number - the domain name was born.

They did leave some particularly irritating legacies however such as using "dots, slashes and colons" like they were going out of fashion and starting all web addresses with the only 3 letters that can have 9 syllables when the word "web" (note just 1 syllable) would have done nicely.)

What is HTML...

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is the basic language used in web pages. It is designed to run in different browsers and different computers. It consists of a list of instructions that tell the browser how to render the page i.e. text size and colour, where to place graphic images etc. HTML has the limitation that, apart from hypertext links, it lacks interactivity. This is the most widely used language for web pages and is adequate where there's a requirement to display fixed information.

What is Java script...

JavaScript is a scripting language that allows more interactivity than HTML and is normally embedded within HTML documents. JavaScript is so commonly used that all except the oldest of browsers can handle it. In contrast to HTML, which is only a list of instructions processed in list order, JavaScript is a proper programming language that allows decision branches to alternative instructions depending on set conditions. Since JavaScript can output HTML, this allows a script to effectively rewrite an HTML page depending on things such as the date or the content of a user's JavaScript cookie.

JavaScript is an example of a client side scripting language i.e. the JavaScript instructions are downloaded by the server and the client (the browser) takes care of parsing the script.

What is a Search Engines...

A software program that trawls through the web (usually via pages that have been submitted to it) and indexes pages into various categories (depending on keyword weighting in the page) so that the pages can be found by users accessing the search engine (e.g. www.google.com).

What are Keywords...

A word used to express the search term that an Internet user might be searching for on the web. For example if you have a site providing information about Fishing, the keyword that you may wish to emphasise for the sake of a search engine will be 'bait'. This helps users to easily find a site.

What is the effect of slow download on my site...

What is a Content Management Sytem...

What is a Content Management Sytem...
If you have a static HTML website then to update your content you must edit your HTML files and upload them to the server. This is fine if you have a good knowledge of HTML but if you don't then you'll have to pay a programmer to do it. With a Content Management System, your pages contain the required code to pull content stored on an online database and write it into your pages. The Content Management System will include an easy to use interface that allows you to update the content held in the database without the need to know HTML or any programming techniques.

What is Flash...

Flash movies use a file format called Shockwave. Instructions embedded within an HTML page load in the Shockwave file which then runs in the browser. A Shockwave movie can manipulate text and graphics in real time as well as reading mouse events to allow the user to interact with it. It can produce spectacular animations with very short download times. You can see embedded Flash movies on the home page of this site.

What is PHP...

PHP is a comprehensive programming language that allows increased functionality to be built into web sites. PHP is a server side language, which means that the script is parsed by the PHP engine on the server before the page is downloaded. PHP pages have a .php file extension as opposed the normal .html file extension. This tells the PHP engine to intercept the pages, parse the PHP code then strip out the PHP instructions before sending the page to the browser. Since PHP can output HTML instructions (as well as JavaScript instructions), this allows different versions of pages to be output depending on preset conditions. PHP is also used to communicate with online databases, such as MySQL, which allows a user's query to a database to be output as an HTML page. Most of the pages on this web site are PHP pages.

What is MySQL...

MySQL is a database system that can hold information online. It allows sophisticated searching facilities using SQL (Standard Query Language). MySQL isn't directly available to HTML pages but can be accessed using a language such as PHP which can bridge the gap. MySQL allows a web site to be database driven with features such as chat rooms, forums, stock catalogues or customer information.

What is DHTML...

DHTML (Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language) is a combination of browser features that work together to allow version 4+ browsers to produce more interactive page effects (those features are HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, the Document Object Model and JavaScript). Whereas with standard HTML a user has to reload a page to change the content, DHTML allows content changes triggered by the mouse movements of the user.
The drop down menus on this site are programmed using DHTML.