Applet: A tiny program that can be embedded in a web page. Applets are supposed to be designed to not be able to do harm to the visitors computer, files etc or to be able to spy on the visitor (e.g. sending the visitor's files to someone or secretly turning on their microphone or webcam and transmitting what is see to someone).

Bandwidth: How much stuff (files, sounds, videos you can send through a connection in a given time (normally a second)). Usually measured in bits-per-second (bps.) A bit is simply a value 0 or 1. Each letter in a web page or document is made up of eight bits - called one byte (pronounced 'bite'). Each tiny dot (pixel) that a low quality graphics file or picture is made of is eight bits too. Better quality colour graphics files and picture are either twenty four bits per pixel - pretty close to the limits of humans vision or thirty two bits per pixel which allows extra information about transparency to be stored. A picture can be between a few dozen pixels square (tiny) and a few thousand pixels square (photographic quality). Video works by showing a large number of pictures in fast succession so video used a lot of bandwidth A fast modem can move about 57,000 bits in one second. Broadband moves hundreds of thousands of bits in a second or even millions of bits allowing full-screen video.

Binary: Information consisting entirely of ones and zeros. Also, commonly used to refer to files that are not simply text files, e.g. images.

Blog: (weB LOG):A blog either diary that has been made available on a web site or a part of a web site that features the latest additions to the site, typically in a magazine like format. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs can be daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update their blog entries. Blog postings are almost always arranged with the most recent additions at the top.

Bogus: Proveably false. (sometime incorrecly rendered as Not genuine, spurious)

Browser: A program on a user's computer that allows the user to look at web sites on the Internet. There are about half a dozen main types of browser and each typically shows websites slightly differently.

Canard:: An ingenious idea that seems like a good idea but isn't.

Cookie: A piece of information sent from a web site to a visitor's Web Browser that allows the visitor's computer to remember things about the visitor's interaction with the site. Cookies typically store things like 'have I been to this site before', 'what username and password did I ask the site to save, 'was there any preference that I had last time I visited that should be remembered'. Cookies are also sent by advertising services on web sites 'have I shown this advert before', 'does the user like (click on) this sort of ad'. Cookies can't read your private information from your computer.

Cruft : Out of date clutter. The 'grot' that computer systems and code gather over time. By extension systems with free log-ons such as free email or forums become 'crufty' by gathering users who only use their accounts once or twice and then abandon them.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet): A special file for specifying the appearance of text and other elements in a web page. CSS was developed for use with HTML in Web pages but is also used in other situations, such as PHP and content managed sites. CSS is typically used to provide a single "library" of styles that are used over and over throughout a large number of related documents, as in a web site. A CSS file might specify that all numbered lists are to appear in italics. By changing that single specification the look of a large number of documents can be easily changed.

Cyberspace: This slightly antiquated phrase originated from author William Gibson in his novelette "Burning Chrome", published in 1982 by Omni magazine. The word Cyberspace is currently used to describe the whole range of information resources available through computer networks generally in an attempt The concept of personally accessible networked information resources dates like the Internet much further back to Isaac Asimov's MultiVac stories in the 1950s.

DHTML: (Dynamic HyperText Markup Language):Web pages that use a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to create features such as letting the user drag items around on the web page, some simple kinds of animation, etc.

DNS: (Domain Name System) The Domain Name System is the system that translates Internet domain names into IP numbers. A "DNS Server" is a server that performs this kind of translation.

Domain Name: The unique name that identifies a web site. Domain Names always have 2 or more parts, separated by dots. The part on the left is the the name chosen by the domain owner. The part on the right relates to what type of site it is, which country etc. A given web site may have more than one Domain Name but a given Domain Name points to only one web site or page. For example, the domain names.

Download: Transferring a file (documents, pictures) from a another computer (on the Internet) to the computer you are are using (in front of you). Web Browsers automatically download content from the Internet to show you - rendering the content as web pages, sounds, video etc as appropriate..

Extranet: An intranet that is accessible to computers that are not physically part of a company's' own private network, but that is not accessible to the general public, for example to allow vendors and business partners to access a company web site.

FAQ: (Frequently Asked Questions) FAQs are documents that list and answer the most common questions on a particular subject.

Fire Wall: A bit of electronics and/or a computer program the protects your computer or computer network from unauthorised access of damage from people on other networks.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol): A method of moving files between two computers - often one being a desktop PC and the other hosting a web site on the Internet sites. FTP is a way to login to another computer for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. FTP is typically the most common way of putting files onto the internet to make a web site. Content managed web sites may carry out FTP without the user being aware of it when they are asked to 'upload' pictures, videos and text to their website. There are many Internet sites that have established publicly accessible repositories of material that can be obtained using FTP, by logging in using the account name "anonymous", thus these sites are called "anonymous ftp servers". FTP was invented and in wide use long before the advent of the World Wide Web and originally was always used from a text-only interface. Long before Tim Berner-Lees invented the world-wide-web one of the founders of National Web Design developed a system that automatically 'browsed' databases on the Internet and downloaded and printed them used FTP to create automatic reports of the latest scientific findings in certain fields - a sort of combined Google and Web Browser.

GIF (Graphic Interchange Format): A common format for image files, especially suitable for simple drawings images containing small numbers of colours and no shades or subtle changes in tone. GIF files are limited to just 256 or 16 colours or shades so do not store photographic images as well as JPEG or PNG.

Gigabyte: Approximately a thousand million bytes. 1024 Megabytes. Enough to store about a million pages of text, a thousand high quality photos, a few hundred normal web sites, a couple of Audio CDs or a single movie in a quality slightly lower than DVD.

hit: A hit on your web site is not the same as a unique visitor. This slightly antiquated phrase is used in reference to the World Wide Web - a hit means a single request from a web browser for a single item from a web server; thus in order for a web browser to display a page that contains 39 graphics (e.g. button etc), 40 ?hits? would occur at the server:1 for the HTML page, and one for each of the 39 graphics. Each time a visitor moved through the site many more hits would register for just one visitor. Typically the number of hits on a web site is hundreds of times the number of unique visitors. So a small hobby site might have a dozen new visitors a day. An unscrupulous web master would report thousands of hits on the site every day.

Home Page (or Homepage): Homepage has several meanings. It can mean (1) the web page that your browser is set to use when it starts up or (2) antiquated the main web page for a business, organization, person or simply the main page out of a collection of web pages.

Hosting: A web hosting service: service that allows individuals and organizations to put their websites onto a hired computer attached to the Internet. A web hosting company provide space on a server (often just a cheap PC) which should be at a data centre - typically a large secure building full of similar or identical PCs. Most sites are hosted on cheap shared servers with large numbers of web sites sharing each PC. Other servers (PCs) at the data centre provide services, such as email. Many cheap hosting providers simply have an obsolete 'bargain' PC running in a corner of their room and sell space on it to hundreds or even thousands of customers for a few pounds a month. This can give them an income of thousands of pounds a month from one PC. If you are looking for the cheapest possible service this might be for you but typically you might find that the cheap PC gets turned off, or the disc crashes and there is no replacement or that the owner losses interest and your site disappears for ever. In most cases with one or a handful of people in the company and thousands of sites it is impossible for the hosting company to give individual support. The National Web Design Agency don't compete in this market sector if you are looking for the very cheapest.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language): The simple code that web browsers read to decide what to show you on a web page. Like a natural language, like French or English it is easy to use quickly and simply but difficult to master. One problem is that different computers have different ways of showing the same html so that web pages need to be tested in a number of browsers. Small errors may be ignored by some computers but will cause catastrophic errors or problems on others. Slight stylistic changes can work on the designers own PC but can have drastic effects on how a customer's browser might interpret you page. Systems like content management and ecommerce systems automatically create the html that the visitors computer's read in a consistent and reliable way avoiding these problems.

Hypertext: Generally, any text that contains links to other documents - words or phrases in the document that can be chosen by a reader and which cause another document to be retrieved and displayed.

Intranet: A private network inside a company or organization - like a private version of the Internet for you own employees.

IP Number (Internet Protocol Number): Every machine that is on the Internet has a unique IP number so that other computers can find it. Many machines (especially servers) also have one or more Domain Names that are essentially 'nicknames' for your ip address to make it easier for people to remember.

ISP (Internet Service Provider) : An institution that provides access to the Internet in some form, usually for money.

IT (Information Technology) : A very general term referring to the entire field of Information Technology - anything from computer hardware to programming to network management. Most medium and large size companies have IT Departments. It is a common misconception that a web site should be something that the IT department deals with - similar in concept to thinking that the corporate annual report should be dealt with by the printer or that retail marketing strategy should be dealt with by the till staff. While some aspects of web design like hosting and coding are IT related issues such as bringing the right qualified leads to the site, having the correct business content, setting an appropriate structure for traffic conversion encouraging repeat sales and referrals are the primary goals of a web site and all fall outside IT which is why a wider remit like that of the the National Web Design Agency may be appropriate. If 'technology' is a word we use that describes something that doesn't work yet - we like to keep the 'technology' out of your way and sort the problems for you.

Java: An advanced computer language designed to write programs that run (via a virtual machine) on any modern computer (and even PDAs and mobile telephones) - unlike normal computer languages which only run on one type of computer. Java is often used to build large, complex systems that involve several different computers interacting across networks, for example transaction processing systems. Using small Java programs (called "Applets"), Web pages can include functions such as animations, calculators, and other fancy tricks. Because Java applets can be put into web pages java is also used to create software with graphical user interfaces such as editors, audio players, web browsers, etc. Java tends to be relatively complex and expensive to develop.

JavaScript: is a programming language that is mostly used in web pages, usually to add features that make the web page more interactive. When JavaScript is included in an HTML file it relies upon the browser to interpret the JavaScript. When JavaScript is combined with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and later versions of HTML (4.0 and later) the result is often called DHTML.

JPEG: (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format is one of the most popular formats for photographic images on the web. It is very poor for line art or simple logo art.

Kilobyte: A thousand bytes. Actually, usually 1024 (210) bytes.

LAN: (Local Area Network) A computer network limited to the immediate area, usually the same building or floor of a building.

Linux : A version of the super-powerful Unix operating system. It has a reputation of being extremely powerful and difficult to program - like using an airliner to go to the supermarket, instead of driving. Once set up for a particular task however it can be extremely easy to use - like getting on an aeroplane to go to Greece instead of driving and so The National Web Design Agency favour this approach getting out skilled experts to do the difficult stuff for our clients and leaving them to have an easy, fast, smooth ride. There are versions of Linux for almost every available type of computer hardware from desktop machines to IBM mainframes to servers to TV-recording boxes like Sky+ and TIVO. The inner workings of Linux are open and available for experts to examine and understand unlike operating systems like Microsoft Windows so in principal it is possible to understand Linux 100% without any unknowable mysteries that exist in all Microsoft products. >>> .

Link rot: A form of 'cruft' in which links on a website gradually become irrelevant or broken as time goes on, because websites that they link to disappear, change their content or redirect to new locations. The phrase also describes the effects of failing to update web pages so that they become out-of-date, containing information that is old and useless, and that clutters up search engine results. The topic is discussed effectively by Tim BL.

Login : Noun: The account name used to gain access to a computer system. Not a secret (contrast with Password); Verb: the act of connecting to a computer system by giving your credentials (usually your "username" and "password").

Megabyte : Technically speaking, a million bytes. In many cases the term means 1024 kilobytes, which is a more than an even million.

Meta Tag: A specific kind of hidden HTML tag that contains information not normally displayed to the user. Meta tags contain information about the page itself, hence the name ("meta" means "about this subject"); Typical uses of Meta tags are to include information for search engines to help them better categorize a page although due to misuse Google, Yahoo and MSN make very little use of Metatags.

Mirror: Generally speaking, "to mirror" is to maintain an exact copy of something. Probably the most common use of the term on the Internet refers to "mirror sites" which are web sites, or FTP sites that maintain copies of material originated at another location, usually in order to provide more widespread access to the resource. For example, one site might create a library of software, and 5 other sites might maintain mirrors of that library.

PageRank: Google decides who comes top of the search engines by two factors. MSN and Yahoo follow Google's method and results.
Google looks at the importance of each page that it indexes. It also decided the relevance of the page to the search term. The importance of a page is measured by a number called PageRank (PR). Pages start at PageRank zero (PR0) and slowly increase if other sites link into them. PageRank is not linear - to climb each PageRank you need about eight times as many links as a page one Consider each link in as a block of 'votes' for your site. All links are not equal and the number of votes depends on the PageRank of the site linking in. The value of a link is decreased if it is on a page with many links out. Most web companies who offer SEO offer a few hundred links in from directories with PageRanks of 0 or 1 giving your page a page rank of 2 or 3. To be a leading site on Google - one at the top for searches you generally need a PageRank of 4 or 5. Some can get you higher page ranks by making you pay for links from high PageRank on a monthly basis. This is not approved of by Google and may get you banned from Google. There are about a dozen other factors that Google uses to blacklist, handicap or ignore your site and these all need to be taken into account by the company optimizing your site. Using our methods, which are all of types approved by Google, (e.g. article writing for high PR sites to get links to yours), we can typically get your PageRank to 5 or 6 and occasionally 7 which will typically give you a PageRank equal to or better than the best sites for most search terms.
 
Page relevance is determined by what is on your web pages, the rest of your site site and the pages linking to it. Inexperienced web designers typically think relevance is determined by 'metatags', hidden words and repeating keywords on a web page. Whilst this works on the very old search engines like Alta Vista modern search engines like Google used by 99.5% of users use these methods to blacklist or handicap your site for cheating.

PDF (Portable Document Format) : A file format designed to enable printing and viewing of documents with all their formatting (typefaces, images, layout, etc.) appearing the same regardless of what operating system is used, so a PDF document should look the same on Windows, Macintosh, linux, OS/2, etc. The PDF format is based on the widely used Postcript document-description language. Both PDF and Postscript were developed by the Adobe Corporation.

Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) : Perl is a programming language that allows web site owners to run programs on their web sites. Perl does not provide significant support for creating programs with a graphical user interface.

PHP (PHP:Hypertext Preprocessor): PHP is a programming language used almost exclusively for creating software that is part of a web site. The PHP language is designed to be intermingled with the HTML that is used to create web pages. Unlike HTML, the PHP code is read and processed by the web server software (HTML is read and processed by the web browser software.).

ping: A command that advanced users often use from their computer to check if a server or computer at a known IP address is running.

Plug-in : A (usually small) piece of software that adds features to a larger piece of software.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics): is a graphics format specifically designed for use on the World Wide Web. PNG enable compression of images without any loss of quality, including high-resolution images. Another important feature of PNG is that anyone may create software that works with PNG images without paying any fees - the PNG standard is free of any licensing costs.

podcasting or pod-casting : A form of audio broadcasting using the Internet, podcasting takes its name from a combination of "iPod" and broadcasting. iPod is the immensely popular digital audio player made by Apple computer, but podcasting does not actually require the use of an iPod. Podcasting involves making one or more audio files available as "enclosures" in an RSS feed. A pod-caster creates a list of music, and/or other sound files (such as recorded poetry, or "talk radio" material) and makes that list available in the RSS 2.0 format. The list can then be obtained by other people using various podcast "retriever" software which read the feed and makes the audio files available to digital audio devices (including, but not limited to iPods) where users may then listen to them at their convenience.

POP (Post Office Protocol) : Post Office Protocol refers to a way that e-mail client software such as Eudora gets mail from a mail server. When you obtain an account from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) you almost always get a POP account with it, and it is this POP account that you tell your e-mail software to use to get your mail.

Portal : Usually used as a marketing term to described a Web site that is or is intended to be the first place people see when using the Web. Typically a "Portal site" has a catalog of web sites, a search engine, or both. A Portal site may also offer email and other service to entice people to use that site as their main "point of entry" (hence "portal") to the Web.

PPP (Point to Point Protocol) : The most common protocol used to connect home computers to the Internet over regular phone lines. Most well known as a protocol that allows a computer to use a regular telephone line and a modem to make TCP/IPconnections and thus be really and truly on the Internet.

Protocol : A set of rules that define exactly how to do something complex. For example in the world of computing the HTTP protocol defines the format for communication between web browsers and web servers, and the SSL protocol defines a format for encrypted communications over the Internet.

Router: A special-purpose computer (or software package) that handles the connection between 2 or more Packet-Switched networks. Routers spend all their time looking at the source and destination addresses of the packets passing through them and deciding which route to send them on.

RSS (Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication): A commonly used protocol for syndication and sharing of content, originally developed to facilitate the syndication of news articles, now widely used to share the contents of blogs. Mashups are often made using RSS feeds. RSS is an XML-based summary of a web site, usually used for syndication and other kinds of content-sharing.

Search Engine: A (usually web-based) system for searching the information available on the Web. Some search engines work by automatically searching the contents of other systems and creating a database of the results. Other search engines contains only material manually approved for inclusion in a database, and some combine the two approaches. See SEO and PageRank.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The practice of designing web pages so that they rank as high as possible in search results from search engines. There is "good" SEO and "bad" SEO. Good SEO involves making the web page clearly describe its subject, making sure it contains truly useful information, and arranging for other high profile web sites to make links to the page. Bad SEO involves attempting to deceive people into believing the page is more relevant than it truly is by doing things like adding inaccurate Meta tags to the page. See Search Engine and PageRank

Server: A computer, or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running, e.g. "Our mail server is down today, that's why e-mail isn't getting out.".

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) : The main protocol used to send electronic mail from server to server on the Internet.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol): A protocol for client-server communication that sends and receives information "on top of" HTTP. The data sent and received is in a particular XML format specifically designed for use with SOAP. SOAP is similar to the XMLRPC protocol except that SOAP provides for more sophisticated handling of complex data being sent between a client and a server. SOAP actually grew from the work that created XMLRPC.

Spam (or Spamming): An inappropriate attempt to use email, a mailing list, or USENET or other networked communications facility as if it was a broadcast medium by sending the same message to a large number of people who didn't ask for it. The term probably comes from a famous Monty Python skit which featured the word spam repeated over and over.

Spyware: Any computer program that you download to your computer, even if you are not aware that you have installed it, can in principle access any of your computer's resources. This is not just limited to seeing where you are surfing on the Internet telling someone else (a very common form of spyware) or looking at your files (documents, pictures) and sending them to someone else. It can also include turning on your computer's microphone and/or web cam and letting someone else see and hear exactly what you are up to at any time. Most spyware tries to get the user to view advertising and/or particular web pages. Some spyware also sends information about the user to another machine over the Internet. Spyware is usually installed without a users' knowledge as part of the installation of other software, especially software such as music sharing software obtained via download.

SQL (Structured Query Language): A specialized language for sending queries to databases. The National Web Design Agency use an industrial-strength SQL database applications called MySQL which allows full access to all it's source code. MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system (DBMS) which has more than 10 million installations currently. Thus, web sites such as YouTube, Adobe, flickr, Chevron, American Express, Boeing,
Friendster, and Wikipedia all use the same underlying databse technology as National Web Design's PowerWeb and Shop-in-a-Box sites. Some of these support more than 85 million dynamic page views per day and more than 1.5 billion MySQL queries per day.

SSL (Secure Socket Layer): A protocol designed to enable encrypted, authenticated communications across the Internet. Although data such as credit card numbers crossing the Internet is currently relatively secure using SSL there have been many incidents of banks secure servers being compromised and while Shop-in-a-Box and PowerWeb's ecommerce module will work with any major banks credit cards National Web Design recommend a secure system which sends details directly to the bank to lower security risks for the merchant.

Tag: The term "tag" can be used as a noun or verb. As a noun, a tag is a basic element of the languages used to create web pages (HTML) and similar languages such as XML. Another, more recent meaning of tag is related to reader-crearted tags where blogs and other content (such as photos, music, etc.) may be "tagged" which means to assign a keyword, such as "politics" or "gardening", this enables searches for "all the blog postings in the past week that are tagged 'prenatal care'".

TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol): This is the suite of protocols that defines the Internet. Originally designed for the UNIX operating system, TCP/IP software is now included with every major kind of computer operating system. To be truly on the Internet, your computer must have TCP/IP software.

TLD (Top Level Domain): The last (right-hand) part of a complete Domain Name. For example in the domain name www.matisse.net ".net" is the Top Level Domain. There are a large number of TLD's, for example .biz, .com, .edu, .gov, .info, .int, .mil, .net, .org, and a collection of two-letter TLD's corresponding to the standard two-letter country codes, for example, .us, .ca, .jp, etc.

Trojan Horse: A computer program is either hidden inside another program or that masquerades as something it is not in order to trick potential users into running it. For example a program that appears to be a game or image file but in reality performs some other function. A Trojan Horse computer program may spread itself by sending copies of itself from the host computer to other computers, but unlike a virus it will (usually) not infect other programs.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL): Loosely speaking - a web address. In its current strict technical meaning, a URL is a URI that, “in addition to identifying a resource, [provides] a means of locating the resource by describing its primary access mechanism (e.g., its network ‘location’).” "Clean" and "cruft-free" describe URLs which are:

• Not tied to technical details, such as the software used or whether the resource comes from a file or a database - so that a change in the technology will not break existing links to the resource. e.g. /cars/audi/ is preferable to /cars/audi/index.php or /myprog.jsp?page=cars/audi/.
• Not tied to internal organisational structure, such as the current editor or department that created the document - so an internal reorganisation will not cause existing links to the document to break. e.g. /recommendations/2007/xyz/ is better than /~users/jane/current-work/xyz/ or /xyz-team/recommendations/.
• Consistent with other URLs in the same site in terms of hierarchy. This is desirable so a user can see where they are in the structure of the site, and can predict where to find what they are looking for. e.g. /cars/audi/ and /cars/ford/, instead of /cars/audi/ but /ford-cars/.
• Consistent with other URLs in the same site in terms of action. This is desirable so a user can predict other, similar URLs on that site, e.g. if /blogs/andrea/feed/ shows a feed of Andrea's blog, then appending /feed/ to any another blog on the same site should show a feed for that blog.
• A single location for a single resource. The same resource should not be available from multiple URLs, as this results in both confusion (Are they the same resource, or is one a copy of the other? Which is the 'right' one? Is one new and the other due to be removed?) and technical difficulties, e.g. counting links to a particular resource, or caching content to speed up access but not being able to show the cached content when the resource is accessed using a different URL.

An example of the difference between "clean" and "standard" URLs could be seen as:

• Standard: http://example.com/index.php?section=articles&subsection=recent
• Clean: http://example.com/articles/recent/

Virus: A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user. The original may modify the copies or the copies may modify themselves, as occurs in a metamorphic virus. A virus can only spread from one computer to another when its host is taken to the uninfected computer, for instance by a user sending it over a network or carrying it on a removable medium such as a floppy disk, CD, or USB drive. Additionally, viruses can spread to other computers by infecting files on a network file system or a file system that is accessed by another computer.

Web page: A document designed for viewing in a web browser. Typically written in HTML. A web site is made of one or more web pages. "First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've *realized* it's a brochure." Douglas Adams - on the irony of applying false limits to the PC and the Web and misunderstanding its potential.

WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning): A set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allows multiple users to not only read but also to add, delete, and change documents residing on a web server. In order to use WebDAV you need WebDAV client software to connect to a HTTP server that has the WebDAV extensions installed. Virtually all common HTTP servers have WedDAV extensions available to them.

Website: The entire collection of web pages and other information (such as images, sound, and video files, etc.) that are made available through what appears to users as a single location. Typically all the of pages in a web site share the same basic URL, for example the following URLs are all for pages within the same web site:.

• http://www.nationalwebdesign.co.uk/.
• http://www.nationalwebdesign.co.uk/about/.
• http://www.nationalwebdesign.co.uk/portfolio/.

The term has a somewhat informal nature since a large organization might have separate "web sites" for each division, but someone might talk informally about the organizations' "web site" when speaking of all of them.

Web Marketing: Its said that human beings, are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. The whole process of marketing, by AdWords, SEO and other means can be systemized using methods based on those outlined by "Scientific Advertising" by Claud C. Hopkins and used by agencies like Ogilvy.

Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity): A popular term for a form of wireless data communication, basically Wi-Fi is "Wireless Ethernet".

Worm: A worm is a virus that does not infect other programs. It makes copies of itself, and infects additional computers (typically by making use of network connections) but does not attach itself to additional programs; however a worm might alter, install, or destroy files and programs.

WWW (World Wide Web): World Wide Web (or simply Web for short) is a term frequently used (incorrectly) when referring to "The Internet". Strictly speaking the web is the network of hypertext servers (HTTP servers), more commonly called "web servers", which are the servers that serve web pages to web browsers. "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form — www — takes three times longer to say than what it's short for." Douglas Adams

XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language): Basically HTML expressed as valid XML. XHTML is intended to be used in the same places you would use HTML (creating web pages) but is much more strictly defined, which makes it a lot easier to create sofware that can read it, edit it, check it for errors, etc. XHTML is expected to eventually replace HTML.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language): A widely used system for defining data formats. XML provides a very rich system to define complex documents and data structures such as invoices, molecular data, news feeds, glossaries, inventory descriptions, real estate properties, etc. As long as a programmer has the XML definition for a collection of data (often called a "schema") then they can create a program to reliably process any data formatted according to those rules. XML is a subset of the older SGML specification - the definition of XML is SGML minus a couple of dozen items.