A

Anchor
Synonymous with hyperlinks, anchor refers to non-linear links among documents. Or more simply put, it's the word or phrase that can be selected to connect to another page or resource.
Anchor Color
Agent
Agents are search tools that automatically seek out relevant online information based on your specifications. Agents are also called intelligent agents, personal agents, knowbots or droids.

Annotations
Personal notes you can attach to the documents you have saved in your Web browser. The notes are available to you whenever the document is viewed.
Archie
Derived from the word archive, Archie is a Net-based service that allows you to locate files that can be downloaded via FTP.
ASCII
(pronounced "Ask-ee") An acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, ASCII is an international standard in which numbers, letters, punctuation marks, symbols and control codes are assigned numbers from 0 to 127. Easily transferred over networks, ASCII is a plain, unadorned text without style or font specifications.
Asychronous Connection
The type of connection a modem makes over a phone line, this connection is not synchronized by a mutual timing signal or clock.
AU Sounds
This is an audio format developed for Sun workstations and often used to distribute sound clips via the Web.
Authoring Software
This term refers to software that enables the creation of multimedia or hypertext documents and presentations.
Avatar
This term refers to an interactive representation of a human in a virtual reality environment; term was popularized by Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash."



Access (Microsoft Access)
A database system developed by Microsoft. Part of Microsoft Office Professional. Mostly used on low traffic web sites running on the Windows platform.

ActiveMovie
A web technology for streaming movies from a web server to a web client. Developed by Microsoft.

ActiveX
A programming interface (API) that allows web browsers to download and execute Windows programs. (See also Plug-In)

Address
See Web Address.

Anchor
In web terms: The starting point or ending point of a hyperlink.
Learn more about links in our HTML tutorial

Anonymous FTP
See FTP Server.

ANSI (American National Standards Institute)
An organization that creates standards for the computer industry. Responsible for the ANSI C standard.

ANSI C
An international standard for the C programming language.

ADO (ActiveX Data Object)
A Microsoft technology that provides data access to any kind of data store.
Learn more about ADO in our ADO tutorial

ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line)
A special type of DSL line where the upload speed is different from the download speed.

Amaya
An open source web browser editor from W3C, used to push leading-edge ideas in browser design.

Animation
A set of pictures simulating movement when played in series.

Anti-Virus Program
A computer program made to discover and destroy all types of computer viruses.

Apache
An open source web server. Mostly for Unix, Linux and Solaris platforms.

Applet
See web applet.

Archie
A computer program to locate files on public FTP servers.

API (Application Programming Interface)
An interface for letting a program communicate with another program. In web terms: An interface for letting web browsers or web servers communicate with other programs. (See also Active-X and Plug-In)

ARPAnet
The experimental network tested in the 1970's which started the development of the Internet.

Authentication
In web terms: the method used to verify the identity of a user, program or computer on the web.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
A set of 128 alphanumeric and special control characters used for computer storing and printing of text. Used by HTML when transmitting data over the web.
See the full list of ASCII codes in our HTML Reference

ASF (Advanced Streaming Format)
A multimedia streaming format. Developed by Microsoft for Windows Media.

ASP (Active Server Pages)
A Microsoft technology allowing the insertion of server executable scripts in web pages.
Learn more about ASP in our ASP tutorial

ASX (ASF Streaming Redirector)
An XML format for storing information about ASF files. Developed by Microsoft for Windows Media.

AVI (Audio Video Interleave)
File format for video files. Video compression technology developed by Microsoft.

ActiveX
An application programming interface (API) that allows web browsers to download and execute Windows programs. For example, Netscape Communicator's support for ActiveX lets users open an Excel spreadsheet from within Netscape Navigator.
Agent
A program that creates a model of a computer user's personal interests and tastes, and acts as a proxy in searching out and prioritizing information for that user. Agent technology is often used to classify and prioritize information for custom delivery via push technology.
Applet
A client-side program written in Java or JavaScript that downloads and executes on the end user's computer rather than executing on the server.
API (Application Programming Interface)
A standard interface built into a program that lets other programs communicate with it. Used by web browsers and databases as an alternative to CGI gateways. The client-side program is written in Java or JavaScript, and it downloads and executes on the end user's computer rather than executing on the server.
ASCII
The "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" is basically a set of numbers that represent all the normal characters one would find on their keyboard. There are many variations on this theme used for different languages or other purposes. Text saved in ASCII (.txt) format can be read by all word processing programs on most platforms.
ASP
Active Server Pages (.asp) make use of special code on Microsoft web servers to create web pages. Generally used in large e-commerce websites.







Active Channel

An Active Channel is a frequently updated information residing on a Web server. Users can subscribe to the channel if they have a CDF (Channel Definition Language) capable browser (e.g. Internet Explorer)

ActiveX

ActiveX is a brand name referring to a set of Microsoft's technologies and services based on COM (Component Object Model) widely released in 1997. On the Internet, ActiveX can be used with IE versions 3 and above and with Netscape Navigator though plug-ins. ActiveX control is a COM object, written as a DLL in a programming language like Visual Basic, that follows ActiveX standards. Once downloaded, ActiveX controls have a large degree of freedom, presenting a security risk. ActiveX controls have to be digitally signed by their creator. Major competitor to ActiveX controls are JavaBeans. Some hosts support ActiveX server components for ASP.

Address

Unique identifier of a web page. URL (Uniformed Resource Locator) is more frequently used for this purpose.

ADN

(Advanced Digital Network). A 56kbps dedicated communication line.

ADO

ActiveX Data Objects. Different data sources can be accessed in the same way within a single data model. The data can be located in various locations, like spreadsheets, databases or ordinary files.

ADSL

(Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Loop). High speed Internet access using the telephone line. It uses line-adaptive modulation and provides data speeds from 384kbps to 1.5 Mbps (upstream and downstream speeds are usually different). Unlike the dial up, it doesn't block the telephone line.

AIFF

Audio Interchange File Format. High quality audio file format introduced by Apple.

Anonymous FTP (Anon FTP)

A method for downloading and uploading files using FTP protocol without having a username or a password. In place of a username, word "anonymous" is used, and in place of a password, email address is usually used. If a hosting plan offers this service, your users will be able to download or upload files with FTP without having their own account.

Anonymous remailer

A SMTP server that allows sending anonymous email messages. It removes or changes the "From" field of all messages that it processes.

ANSI

American National Standards Institute. The U.S. standards organization.

Apache

Apache is an open-source (source code is freely available and can be shared) HTTP Web server software. According to Netcraft survey, it is currently the most popular web server on the Net. It is usually run on Unix operating system versions like Linux or BSD, but it can also be run on Windows. It is a full-featured server with many powerful add-ons freely available. Apache's major competitor is Microsoft's IIS.

Applet

Most often refers to a small Java program designed to run in a Web browser. Java applets run in a sandbox, so they can't perform unauthorized functions like file reading or opening Net connections to other computer from your computer.

Archie

An online database of anonymous ftp sites and their contents. It allows to search the ftp repositories using file name queries.

Archive

Archives are large files containing valuable data. Archives are often compressed to save space.

Archive site

A server that contains archives. It can be accessed by FTP, E-mail or HTTP.

ARJ

One of the most popular compression formats.

ARPA

(Advanced Research Projects Agency) US governmental organization responsible for creating the ancestor of today's Internet.

ARPAnet

Network created by ARPA in 1969.

ASCII

(American Standard Code for Information Interchange). A standard for coding text files. Every character has an associated number and any text can be represented by a sequence of numbers.

ASP

Active Server Pages. ASP is Microsoft's server-side scripting technology. An Active Server Page has an .asp extension and it mixes HTML and scripting code that can be written in VBScript or JScript. ASP is distributed with Microsoft's IIS web server, so most host using IIS will also offer ASP for dynamic web programming. ASP.NET is the next version of ASP. Other popular server-side scripting languages are Perl, PHP, ColdFusion, TCL, Python, and JSP.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)

A set of network protocols designed for multimedia transmission. Data is partitioned into cells (53 bytes each) and passed along a virtual circuit. ATM allows for building very high speed networks.

Attachment

A part of an email message. Usually a file (a data file or a multimedia file) or a webpage. It is not a part of the text of the message, instead it is attached to the message.

AU

Audio file format for Unix systems.

Authentication

Authentication is used to confirm the identity of the other party involved in the data transmission.

AVI

Audio/Video Interleave. Audio file format used by Microsoft Widows.

NetBEUI (Net Bios Extended User Interface)
An enhanced version of NetBIOS.

NetBIOS (Network Basic Input Output System)
An application programming interface (API) with functions for local-area networks (LAN). Used by DOS and Windows.

Navigate
In web terms: The same as Browse.

Netscape
The browser from the company Netscape. The most popular browser for many years. Today IE has the lead.
Learn more about browsers in our browser section

Newsgroup
An on-line discussion group (a section on a news server) dedicated to a particular subject of interest.

News Reader
A computer program that enables you to read (and post messages) from an Internet newsgroup.

News Server
An Internet server dedicated to the task of serving Internet newsgroups.

Node
In web terms: A computer connected to the Internet, most often used to describe a web server.