Glossary
- Vector graphics
- Computer-aided design (CAD) programs and drawing applications such as Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw produce graphics that don't look blocky when you zoom in on them. They scale up easily because they store geometric information about shapes and lines called vectors. These images are unlike pictures from paint programs or scanners, which are called bitmaps.
- Viewer
- A viewer assists your Web browser by handling files that the browser itself can't. Viewers can be any type of application, since they may be called upon to handle any kind of file--even sound files. Because it seems weird to use a viewer to play a sound file, some people prefer to call them helpers.
- VPN (Virtual Private Network)
- A Virtual Private Network, or VPN, is a private network of computers that's at least partially connected by public phone lines. A good example would be a private office LAN that allows users to log in remotely over the Internet (an open, public system). VPNs use encryption and secure protocols like PPTP to ensure that data transmissions are not intercepted by unauthorized parties.
- VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language)
- The World Wide Web isn't a linear experience like leafing through and reading a book. The Web enables you to jump around from place to place. But in most cases, you jump from one page-based site to another. HTML is the specification for page-oriented Web navigation. VRML is a 3D navigation specification, hammered out by Silicon Graphics, Intervista Software, and other organizations and individuals. It enables the creation of 3D sites (not necessarily just chat rooms, though this is one example of its use). Many sites and FAQs are devoted to discussing and showing off the technology. The specification is also available online.
- WAN
- Stands for Wide Area Network. A network of computers that covers a large geographical distance.
- Web Application
- An application in which all or part of it is downloaded from the Web each time it is run. The term typically refers to the use of Web browsers and Java applets. Web pages increasingly resemble the interactive behavior of local applications. Retrieving a Web page may cause the execution of code in the Web server as well as code in the HTML page brought into the user's machine. Clicking an icon on a Web page may cause a Java applet to be downloaded and executed in the user's machine.
- Web Page
- A Web page is a document written in HTML and meant to be viewed in a Web browser on the Internet or World Wide Web such as Netscape, Internet Explorer, or Opera.
- Whois
- An Internet database that provides information on a person or an organization.
- WWW
- Stands for World Wide Web. A very popular Internet service that organizes information using a hypertext and hypermedia system of linking documents, FTP sites, gopher sites, WAIS, and telnet.
- XHTML
- XHTML eXtensible HyperText Markup Language. HTML re-written as an application of the XML language. See the W3C Working Draft: Building XHTML Modules
- XML (Extensible Markup Language)
- XML is the Extensible Markup Language, a system for defining specialized markup languages that are used to transmit formatted data. XML is conceptually related to HTML, but XML is not itself a markup language. Rather it's a metalanguage, a language used to create other specialized languages.
- ZIP
- An open standard for compression and decompression used widely for PC download archives, ZIP was developed by Phil Katz for his DOS-based program PKZip, and it is is now widely used on Windows-based programs such as WinZip and Drag and Zip. The file extension given to ZIP files is .zip.
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