The computer industry is famous for its acronyms. In fact there is even a
course in the CS department titled "How to acronymize your creation, and
make it impossible to decipher." (Maybe I'm kidding, maybe I'm not).
Here are some of the more popular Web related acronyms and their meanings:
"A Hah!
" you say, "I know what that one is, you already used it!" Correct, it
stands for World Wide Web. Also known as W3, or W cubed, or just "The Web".
HyperText Markup Language. We won't get into HTML too much in this class, but
suffice to say you will hear it a lot when using with the Web. It is the
what web pages are written in.
Uniform Resource Locator. It is a standard for specifying an object on the
Internet, such as a file or
image. It's the thing in the "Location box" on
your web browser. (We will get into it much more later). Examples include:
http://www.ohiou.edu/
gopher://oucsace.cs.ohiou.edu/
news:ohiou
mailto:rbarrette@ohiou.edu
HyperText Transfer Protocol / Daemon / Secure Server
HTTP is the high-
level protocol that web browsers and server speak that
rides on top of TCP/IP (the language of the Internet). A Daemon is a
server, so in this case an HTTP server. HTTPS is relatively recent and
is a secure server. Anything
you send to the server (we will get into sending things later) is
encrypted so that no one can read what you are sending. This is critical
to commerce over the web. No one wants their credit card numbers going
across the net in clear text.
A link is something in a hypertext document that can be clicked. It is
usually marked in a different color than the rest of the text, and/or is
underlined. This is a link. Clicking on a link
will usually take you somewhere else in the web, sometimes far, sometimes
near. The important thing is that it doesn't matter.
The process of sitting in front of a computer and using a web browser. Each
of you
is surfing the web right this very second. Neat huh?
There really is no intrinsic difference between the two and you will hear them
used interchangeably. It really is a matter of personal taste. For me, I
prefer to refer to the "main" page in a set of documents as the homepage, and
the rest are just web pages. But it really doesn't matter, what is important
is that it is a page of text with links in it written in HTML.
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© 1995 Rich Barrette