BANDWIDTH - The
amount of information travelling through a single
channel at any one moment in time. On web servers,
there is usually a limited amount of bandwidth
that any one particular web site can use.
BIT - the smallest increment of data, knnown
as a binary digit. It has a value or 1 or 0, corresponding
to on or off.
BYTE - a unit of memory storage capable of holding
a single character, equal to 8 bits. (eg. k)
COOKIE - A piece of software which records information
about you. It holds this information until such
time that the server requests it. For example,
if you are browsing around a virtual shop, each
time you place an item in your basket the information
is stored by the cookie until you decide to buy
and the server requests the purchase information.
DOMAIN NAME SERVER - Computers connected to the
Internet whose job it is to keep track of the
IP Addresses and Domain Names of other machines.
When called upon, they take the Alpha-numeric
(ASCII, eg. www.cnn.com) Domain Name and convert
it to the relevant numeric IP Address (eg. 296.11.40.102).
DOMAIN NAME SYSTEM - Allows users to relate to
computers on the Internet by using textual addresses
(e.g. www.bbcnews.co.uk) for ease of use, rather
than the numeric IP Address system.
FIREWALL - Secures a company or organisation's
internal network from unauthorised external access
(most commonly in the form of Internet hackers).
FTP - File Transfer Protocol - a protocol for
moving files over the internet from one computer
to another. FTP programmes are used to upload
web pages to a web server.
GIGABYTE - A thousand Megabytes.
HTML - HyperText Markup Language - the tagging
language used to format Web pages. It allows pictures,
text and code to be combined to create Web documents.
The most important feature - hypertext - makes
it possible for links to be made between different
documents.
HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol used for transmitting
of hypertext documents (htm, html, etc.)
Other protocols are FTP (File Transfer Protocol),
News, and Gopher.
PACKET - A portion of data which is of a certain
size, normally 1000 to 1500 bytes. A message may
be broken up into a series of packets and sent
via the best routes available. If a path or route
is down or blocked, those packets will be re-routed
along other paths to ensure all the data arrives
correctly.
PDF - Portable Document Format - a file format
developed by Adobe Systems and used for capturing
formatted page layouts for distribution. PDF documents,
when viewed with the required Adobe Acrobat Reader,
will appear exactly as they were intended.
PING - A program that determines whether a certain
computer on the internet or a local area network
is responding. It does this by sending a small
quantity of data to the computer and it should
acknowledge the receipt of this data.
ROUTERS - Routers connect all the networks together
that make up the Internet.
URL - A reference of a resource on the internet.
A Uniform Resource Locator is an address made
up of a Protocal Identifier and a Resource Name,
eg. http : //www.google.com
Http is the protocol identifier, the resource
name (IP address or Domain name) is //www.google.com
W3C - The World Wide Web Consortium - a consortium
of many companies and organisations that "exists
to develop common standards for the evolution
of the World Wide Web". It is run by a joint
effort between the Laboratory for Computer Science
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory,
where the WWW was first developed.
XML - Extensible Markup Language - a formal markup
metalanguage for the design of web pages.
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