Concepts and terms in the world of websites

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is how much stuff you can send through an Internet connection, and is usually measured in bits-per-second. A full page of English text is about 16,000 bits and a fast modem can move about 57,000 bits in one second. Full-motion full-screen video requires roughly 10,000,000 bits-per-second. Telephone lines have the lowest bandwidth while fiber optics have the highest. This is why text pages load quickly, while the graphics and other bells and whistles make a website slower to load.

CGI

A Common Gateway Interface is a small program, or script, that takes information from a web server and does something with it, such as processing the information a user has sent to it via an online form. Any piece of software can be a CGI program if it handles input and output according to the CGI standard. Perl, PHP, Python, JavaScript, and TCL are some common scripting languages used to write CGI programs.

Copyright

In regards to the Internet, this applies to images, music, and written works. A copyright is protection for the expression of an idea, and it is a set of specific rights to content use, manipulation, and distribution that the law grants content creators, leaving all other rights to the public. Almost everything created since 1989 is copyrighted. This means that website creators must either gain permission to use someone else’s graphics and work, or create it from scratch.

Domain name

A domain name is the unique name that identifies an Internet site. Actually, it is a name that identifies one or more IP addresses. It always has two or more parts, separated by dots. For instance, the domain name in the URL http://www.upfronttechnology.com is “upfronttechnology.com”. A domain name must be purchased from a registrar accredited by The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and cannot be purchased for longer than 10 years at a time. Search www.networksolutions.com site to find out if a name is available.

Email

Email, also spelled e-mail, is the method of electronically transmitting messages from one computer to another over communications networks.

Flash

Macromedia’s Flash is one of the most popular browser independent animation programs in use. A user must have the Macromedia Flash Player plug-in to view a Flash creation, which is estimated to be installed on 97% of the internet-enabled desktops, according to Macromedia. Flash adds animation to an otherwise static web page, but with the trade-off that the page will be slower to load. Whole sites created using Flash, as well as using a fancy Flash intro to a website are strongly discouraged by most web designers.

Forms

Online forms are web pages comprised of blank fields and other entry options for a user to fill in with information. It is the most common way to collect and process information from visitors to a website. The fields usually ask for personal information like name, address, other contact information, and feedback. This user’s output can be sent as an email form, stored online, printed, or returned to the user for other purposes. Forms are written in HTML and usually processed by CGI programs.

Hosting

In this case, a host is a company that rents space for a website owner to store the actual website code and associated files. The website physically resides on a computer that’s connected to the Internet. The web hosting company provides the equipment, the high-speed connection to the Internet, and monitors it’s customers sites to ensure availability and security. Good data centers have multiple connections to the Internet, backup power generators, and perform frequent backups.

There are four types of web hosting options.

Shared Hosting

This is a web hosting service in which a single server is shared by multiple web hosting companies. It is usually very cheap or free, and is good for smaller and simple websites. While low cost is an advantage, hosting a large number of sites on one server can slow down the connection for all visitors to those sites. Some web hosts do not restrict who can be hosted on a web server, so if one website is blackholed for spamming, the other sites on that server are affected. (Getting blackholed means that other networks will refuse email originated from those IP addresses.) A good host company will efficiently manage it’s server space and monitor server uptime.

Collocated Hosting

Literally, co-located hosting, this is a solution that allows the website owner to place their own web server on the premises of a service provider. The provider often has better resources like high security against theft and vandalism as well as high Internet security, regulated backup power, and dedicated Internet connections. The host is responsible for the network while the website owner is responsible for support an maintenance.

Unmanaged Hosting

This is like collocated hosting except that the website owner leases, rather than owns, the web server from a host.

Managed Dedicated Hosting

This is the most expensive form of hosting, and means leasing a server from a host and having that company provide a high level of support and maintenance on the server. This should be the most secure and powerful hosting option, often with unlimited software options, server uptime monitoring, hardware warranty, and superior security maintenance.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the authoring language used to create documents on the World Wide Web and controls how web pages appear. It uses a variety of tags and attributes to define the structure of a web page. Selecting the browser’s ‘View Source’ option will open a document with the HTML code for that web page. There are hundreds of tags, and several versions of HTML including DHTML (Dynamic HTML), and XHTML (Extensible HTML). The W3C is the governing body that decides what is allowable, and sanctions newer versions.
XHTML 1.0 is the first major change to HTML since HTML 4.0 was released in 1997. It brings the rigor of XML to Web pages and is the keystone in W3C's work to create standards that provide richer Web pages on an ever increasing range of browser platforms including cell phones, televisions, cars, wallet sized wireless communicators, kiosks, and desktops. (From w3c.org)

Images / Photos / Graphics

There are several types of images that most web browsers can view. These are the extensions that you see at the end of a file’s name. A GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) is a common format for image files and is usually smaller than those stored in JPEG format. GIFs do better with images containing large areas of the same color, and does not store photographic images well. Also, GIFs can be animated, whereas JPEGs cannot. A JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group), also spelled JPG and pronounced ‘jay-peg’, is a compression technique for images and photographs that balances compression against loss of detail in the image. Most digital cameras save photos using the JPEG format. GIFs and JPEGs are the two most widely used and well supported image file formats on the World Wide Web. A third version, PNG (Portable Network Graphics), pronounced ‘ping’, is a file format that is designed to be a replacement for the GIF format without the legal restrictions associated with GIF for software manufacturers. It is not as well supported but it supports images with more colors.

Search Engines

A search engine searches documents for specific keywords and returns a list of documents where the keywords were found. It can be for a single website, but most commonly brings to mind systems like Google and Excite. A search engine typically works by using a ‘spider’ to fetch as many documents as possible, then uses an indexer to read these documents and create an index based on the words contained in those documents. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each search, or ‘query’. Google’s search engine is one of the most popular and widely used.
A website is indexed into a search engine either when a spider finds it or the site is submitted to a search engine. Having links to a site on other websites increases the odds that it will be found by a spider and increases it’s importance in the index.

URL

The Uniform Resource Locator is the World Wide Web address of a site on the Internet. An example is

‘http://www.upfronttechnology.com’.

Web Browser

A web browser, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer, is a software program that interprets HTML code and renders that code as a web page for a user to browse and use. Browsers determine how the elements of the code will be displayed, and how multimedia elements like sound and video will be handled. According to the W3C, Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, and Netscape are the most popular programs.

Website

A website is a virtual location on the World Wide Web. It is a collection of web pages that represent a company, individual, or a specific topic. Each website contains a home page, which is the first document that users view, and a collection of other web pages and files, graphics, multimedia files, and hyperlinks. A user must have a web browser to view websites. Websites can range in size from one page to a vast compilation of pages and files.

W3C

The World Wide Web Consortium was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the original architect of the World Wide Web, to develop common and open standards so that web page design evolves in one direction rather than being splintered among competing factions. These standards seek to lead the web to its full potential as a source of information, communication, and commerce. The W3C provides a repository of information for developers and users and is the chief standards body for HTTP and HTML.