www.riscos.com Technical Support: Acorn Internet User Guide   Appendix C: Glossary

ASCII	(American Standard Code for Information Interchange). This is the world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all upper and lowercase Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, and so on.
bandwidth	The amount of information you can send through a communications connection such as a modem.
BBS	(Bulletin Board System). An electronic message system for reading and posting messages. People can carry on discussions, upload and download files, and make announcements via a BBS without everyone having to be logged on at the same time.
browser	The software that you run on your computer which displays pages and can fetch pages when requested from other computers.
client	The user of a network service. A client is a computer or program which contacts and requests a service of another computer or program (a server), often across a great distance.
Cyberspace	A term which refers to the whole range of information resources available on the Internet.
domain name	The unique name that identifies an Internet site. Domain names have 2 or more parts organised in a hierarchical sequence from the left (most specific) to the right (most general). Each part is separated by a dot. For example: acorn.co.uk or www.bbcnc.org.uk
email	(Electronic mail) A system where messages are sent from one person to another via computer. Email is one of the most popular uses of the Internet.
e-text	(Electronic text) Any document which is stored on a computer.
e-zine	(Electronic magazine) A magazine which is stored on a computer and which you can read over the Internet.
FAQ	Frequently-Asked Questions) A document which lists and answers the most common questions on a particular subject.
FTP	(File Transfer Protocol) A method of transferring files over a network from one computer to another.
gateway	A computer which passes data between dissimilar networks, mapping and translating the data as required between the two different "worlds".
history	A list of the Web pages you have visited in the current Browser session.
hits	The number of matches found in a search. For example, when you do a search for documents containing the word "mandelbrot" in the Lycos catalogue, a list of over 600 hits is returned, meaning that, the catalogue knows of more than 600 documents on the Web which contain this string.
home page	The top-level page for an individual or organisation. The home page is often the starting point for a collection of documents at a particular Web site. The term "home page" is also used to refer to the page you see when you first start up a browser.
hotlist	A list of documents that you have marked as interesting or notable. Once you've added a document to your hotlist, you can quickly and easily revisit it whenever you want to.
HTML	(HyperText Markup Language) The markup language used to describe the layout, structure, contents and links in any document on the World Wide Web. HTML uses markup tags to tell the Web browser how to display the text.
HTTP	(HyperText Transfer Protocol) The method used to move World Wide Web documents across the Internet.
hypertext	Hypertext is any text that contains links to other documents, sound files, pictures or movies. Links appear as highlighted words or phrases. When you click on a link, the destination document animation, picture, or whatever is displayed on your computer.
inline image	A picture which appears on a Web page, alongside the text. To include an inline image in a page, you embed a special HTML tag which refers to a graphics file, such as a GIF, JPEG or TIFF file.
Internet	A huge collection of thousands of interconnected computer networks spread throughout the world.
modem	(MOdulator, DEModulator) A device that connects a computer to a phone line, allowing your computer to talk to other computers via the phone system.
Mosaic	A Web browser for Macintosh, Windows and UNIX systems.
Netscape	A Web browser for Macintosh, Windows and UNIX systems.
newsgroups	Discussion groups, where comments can be passed among hundreds of thousands of computer users on a particular topic which interests them.
page	Any document on the World Wide Web. Pages are text files marked up with HTML tags, which specify the layout and content of a page, as well as links to other pages.
protocol	A set of formats and procedures for exchanging information over a network. The formal specification of a protocol includes a description of the format of messages and of the rules two computers must use to exchange those messages.
server	A provider of resources. The term server is used to refer to a particular piece of software, such as a Web server, or to the computer on which the server software is running. A server shares its resources with other computers (clients) on the network.
service provider	A company that offers use of its dedicated communication lines for connecting you to the Internet.
SGML	(Standard Generalised Markup Language) An International standard for encoding textual information in terms of its structure - title page, chapter, paragraph, poem, stanza, etc - and for conveying information about typographical elements such as changes in typeface, special characters, and so on. HTML is a subset of SGML.
tags	Short codes embedded in a document which tell a Web browser how to display the text. Tags consist of a left angle bracket (<) followed by the name of the tag, and then a right angled bracket (>). Tags are usually paired, for example <H1> and </H1>. The ending tag looks like the starting tag except that a forwards slash (/) precedes the tag name. So <H1> signals the start of a level-one heading, and </H1> signals the end of the heading. See A Beginner's Guide to HTML for more information.
telnet	A program which lets you log in to another computer on the Internet.
URL	(Uniform Resource Locator) The standard way of naming resources on the World Wide Web. A URL looks like this: http://www.bbcnc.org.uk/online/schools/hinchhome For more information on URLs, see Identifying resources.
Usenet	A world-wide system of discussion groups called newsgroups.
Web page	See page.
Web server	The term can refer both to a computer which stores World Wide Web resources (HTML files, images, sound files, movies, and so on) and to the software running on the computer which provides the resources to Internet clients when requested.
Web site	An area on a Web server containing resources such as pages, images, sound files and movies.
World Wide Web	A huge collection of information - text, pictures, movies, sound clips - stored on computers throughout the world, which you can access easily from your computer via a network. Synonyms: WWW, W3, the Web