Web Design Terms and Other Important Terms
If you want to learn how to web design or simply do something using a web design language a great resource is W3schools.com.
Index
Internet
The internet is the interconnected network of computers and servers. The internet began as a network to connect computers at research facilities and universities. It started as the ARPAnet where 4 computers located at UCLA, Standford Research Institute, University of California Santa Barbara and the University of Utah were connected. A brief history of the internet can be found at the Internet Society.
Web Client
Connected to the internet via a computer only when needed. It usually runs a web browser software. A web client will request, and receive web pages and files from a web server.
Web Server
A web server is continually connected to the internet and will send information to the web client when a request is made.
FTP
The file transfer Protocol is a set of rules that allow files to be exchanged between computers on the internet. Many designers use FTP access to transfer their website files to their web server using FTP upload software.
IP
People often refer to their IP address as their IP. The Internet Protocol (IP) is a set of rules that controls how data is sent between computers and servers on the internet. Every device connected to the internet has a unique numeric address consisting of a set of four groups of numbers separated by a period or decimal. The four group of numbers are referred to as octets and each group is a value from 0 - 255.
HTTP
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It is used to communicate between the client computer and the website server.
HTML
HTML is a web design language for describing web pages using element tags and attributes that your web browser interprets. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is not a programming language. HTML uses markup language tags to describe a web page. HTML tags are keywords surrounded by angled brackets for example.
XHTML
XHTML stands for EXtensible HyperText Markup Language and is very similar to html. XHTML is stricter and cleaner than HTML. XHTML uses the tags and attributes of HTML with the the syntax of XML.
CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is used to style an html document (webpage) you can use an external CSS file or code it into your html document. Most designers will use external stylesheets as they are easier and much cleaner because internal CSS is messy and can be harder to read in the html.
Javascript
Javascript is similar to css in the fact that it adds to html but is used for different things. Javascript is used to make a website interactive while CSS is used to make a site more attractive. Javascript is not the same as Java which is a programming language for computers. Javascript is usually embeded into an html document but can be used in an external file.
XML
.XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language and is a mark up language like html. The difference though is that XML was design to transport and store data, not display data like HTML does.
Domain Names
Top Level Domain also usually just referred to as domain name locates an organization or other entity on the internet. Top-Level Domain is the .com (.net, .org, etc..) portion of web address which identifies what that entity is. The domain is the portion before the TLD which if we use www.spruz.com, "spruz" is the domain. If you have a sub-domain it would be the part before the domain for example my.spruz.com where "my" is the subdomain. If you have a free site you have a sub-domain of Spruz's domain name.
| Author: | Robert |
| Published: | Jun 17th 2011 |
| Modified: | Jun 17th 2011 |