Web Publishing: Glossary

Division of Information Technology
Web Publishing @ SFSU
Glossary of Internet Terms

To look up terms not listed here, please consult the online computing dictionary.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol: A client-server protocol which allows a user on one computer to transfer files to and from another computer over a TCP/IP network. Also the client program the user executes to transfer files.
GIF: Graphical Interchange Format: A standard for digitized images compressed with the LZW algorithm, defined in 1987 by CompuServe (CIS).
HTML: HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language: Which can simply be described as a set of formatting commands added to text files. HTML codes can be recognized by the pointy brackets that surround them <>.
Example: Strong outputs Strong
The codes can also compounded to have two or more effects:
Example: Strong outputs Strong
HTTP: Hypertext Transport/Transfer Protocol: The client-server TCP/IP protocol used on the World- Wide Web for the exchange of HTML documents.
Hypertext: A collection of documents (or "nodes") containing cross-references or "links" which, with the aid of an interactive browser program, allow the reader to move easily from one document to another.
JPG/JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group: The original name of the committee that designed the standard image compression algorithm.
Plug-in: A browser add-on that usually requires installing platform specific software before certain web pages/features can be viewed/interacted with. Not all plug-in's are available for all platforms.
RRGGBB: Red-Green-Blue color triplets represented in hexadecimal format. Examples:
Red=#FF0000, Yellow=#FFFF00, Green=#00FF00, Blue=#0000FF,
Black=#000000, White=#FFFFFF, Cyan=#00FFFF, Magenta=#FF00FF
Telnet: Telnet is the main Internet protocol for creating a connection with a remote machine. It gives the user the opportunity to be on one computer system and do work on another,which may be across the street or thousands of miles away. In WWW publishing telnet is used to log into the web server and 'set the permissions' of files and directories. Once a telnet session has been established, commands specific to the remote host must be used. If you don't know what commands to use try typing: help, ?, or menu to obtain host specific help
URL: Uniform/Universal Resource Locator. A draft standard for specifying an object on the Internet, such as a file or newsgroup. URLs are used extensively on the World-Wide Web. Examples include:
WWW: World Wide Web: An Internet client-server hypertext distributed information retrieval system which originated from the CERN High-Energy Physics laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland.
WWW browser: A program which allows a person to read hypertext. The browser gives some means of viewing the contents of nodes and of navigating from one node to another.

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Last modified February 11, 2008 by the Web Team