Category: Terms

  • The World Wide Web (defined)

    The World Wide Web, also known as the Web, is the part of the Internet that consists of structured text files, called web pages, that link to other web pages and digital files using hypertext links. Every page or file on the Web is identified by its Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

    Web pages are written in a structured markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language), a type of text file. These web pages are stored on a web server, a computer that shares web pages and linked files over the Internet. A collection of web pages on a web server is known as a website. Websites are most commonly identified by a unique domain name. You use a web browser, such as Firefox, to navigate and view these web pages stored on web sites.

    It’s a common mistake to think of the World Wide Web as the entire Internet, but the Web is in fact only part of the Internet, just the part that most people are familiar with and interact with the Web more than any other Internet protocol, including email.

    Before the invention of the World Wide Web and the web browsers needed to view and navigate the Web, people using the Internet encountered a text-only Internet. Since plain text is still the basic building block of information transmission on the Internet, you can still view everything on the Internet, including web pages, as text-only documents. But why do that when you can see colorful web pages with images, video, audio, and beautiful typography? That’s one of the reasons that the World Wide Web grew so fast.

    Read more about the World Wide Web on Wikipedia, and learn about the Web’s history, standards, and related technologies.

  • Virtual Machine (defined)

    A Virtual Machine (VM) is essentially a second computer that runs in the memory of your computer hardware, the host computer. This computer-within-a-computer runs on top of the operating system of the host computer, and therefore can be started and stopped just like any other application on the host computer. If software on the virtual machine misbehaves, and causes the virtual machine to crash, it’s simply a matter of restarting the virtual machine, while your host computer continues to run.

    Also, your VM may run a completely different operating system from the host machine. You could, for example, run a Windows or Linux virtual machine on a Macintosh. Since VMs share the hardware resources of the host computer, VMs run best on host computers that have copious amounts of RAM, disk space, and powerful CPUs.

    Web developers use VMs to:

    • Build and test web sites on a virtual web server on their own local development computer.
    • Test a website from browsers running on different operating systems installed on different virtual machines, all on the same host computer.
    • Run multiple web servers on a single physical computer.

    More Information about Virtual Machines

    From the Virtual machine article on Wikipedia:

    There are different kinds of virtual machines, each with different functions:

    Virtual Machines – Wikipedia
    • System virtual machines (also termed full virtualization VMs) provide a substitute for a real machine. They provide functionality needed to execute entire operating systems. A hypervisor uses native execution to share and manage hardware, allowing for multiple environments which are isolated from one another, yet exist on the same physical machine. Modern hypervisors use hardware-assisted virtualization, virtualization-specific hardware, primarily from the host CPUs.
    • Process virtual machines are designed to execute computer programs in a platform-independent environment.

  • Blog (defined)

    A Blog (short for web log) is a type of website that consist of discreet, text-based entries, or posts, that are typically organized in reverse chronological order, meaning the latest entry is listed first, and earlier entries are listed below.

  • Creative Commons (defined)

    The Creative Commons organization is a non-profit that:

    provides free, easy-to-use copyright licenses to make a simple and standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work–on conditions of your choice.

    What this means for web developers and designers is:

    • a wealth of high quality content
    • available mostly free of charge

    Just be sure to adhere to the licensing conditions specified by the artist or contributor, which often means including

    • attribution
    • not making changes to the original
    • only using the image for personal or non-profit uses.

    You can use the Creative Commons search tool to find:

    • Images
    • Music
    • Video
    • Other Media

    You can also specify how restrictive the license is for your use, by finding stuff you can:

    • use for commercial purposes
    • modify, adapt, or build upon

    Be sure to Add CC Search to your browser’s bookmark bar, or you can even use CC Search in the Firefox Search field.

  • Protocol (defined)

    In the world of computers and networks, a protocol is an agreed-upon set of rules or procedures for transferring data between different devices. When two computers use the same protocol to communicate, it means they’ve agreed to use the same structure for the data they are exchanging, and that they will follow the same steps when they are sending or receiving information.

    Since all digital devices (computers, smartphones, tablets, routers, and so on) manipulate numbers (digits), any information they work with must be encoded as numbers. When is encoded on one computer, it must be decoded on the other to communicate. A protocol is essentially an agreed upon way to encode and decode data, and then also set of rules on how to communicate between digital devices. By using the same communication protocols, two very different computers (say, an iPhone and a Windows computer) can exchange data accurately, even if they each encode that data differently.

    Think of the postal system: we address envelopes using a set of conventions that make it easier, even possible, to direct the envelope to the correct destination. For example, the address on the middle of the envelope is the destination address, and the address in the upper left (or back) of the envelope is the return address. If there’s an error in the destination address, the postal service uses the return address to send the envelope back to the sender, with “address unknown” stamped over the original destination. This is an example of how postal protocols make it possible to deliver mail and how to handle errors in addresses.

    Computers use similar rules (where to put the address and return address, what format to use) and similar procedures (what to do when the address is incorrect, and how to notify the sender) but these networking protocols are much stricter and complex.

    Some examples of common Internet Protocols include:

    • TCP/IP
    • HTTP
    • HTTPS
    • SMTP
    • IMAP
    • FTP

  • Internet (defined)

    The Internet is a network of computer networks that uses the same computer networking language (or protocol), TCP/IP. Before the wide adoption of TCP/IP as a common language that most computer systems understood, many computer networks used proprietary protocols owned by specific corporations.

    In practical terms, this meant that you could only communicate with the other people who used the same proprietary network. Whether this was IBM’s TokenRing or AppleShare at the office, or Compuserve at home, you could only reach, at most, other people or network resources (like printers, email servers, or shared databases) that used the same company’s networking products.

    Since no one company owns the TCP/IP protocol, or any of the other protocols in the Internet protocol suite, any computer or software company can use these protocols to connect their devices, programs, or products to the rest of the world. You use some of these protocols every day, including HTTP (for browsing the World Wide Web) or SMTP, POP and IMAP (for sending and receiving email).

    Notice that the World Wide Web — the web sites you visit using a browser on your computer, tablet or smartphone — is just one part of the Internet. Also, the Internet can operate over all kinds of connections, including wired (i.e., Cat 5 or fiber optic cable) or wireless (i.e., WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular) networks.

    Because of this flexibility and openness, the Internet has grown to become the largest shared network in history, much larger than the original (landline) telephone network or any private computer network.

    More from Wikipedia

    The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.

    — Internet – Wikipedia