Affiliate Link. What you see is a link to another website. The computer sees a piece of code which credits the first site for referring you to the second site. The whole premise is to pay the first site for sending you to the second one.

Agent. Any program which accesses a website. Spiders and browsers are agents, specifically user agents.

Alias. Your domain name points to yourdomain.com. Suppose you also own a second domain name -- seconddomain.com -- which points to yourdomain.com/subdirectory/. The seconddomain.com is an alias.

Anchor. This is an "A" tag used in both bookmarks and links. An anchor is a point in a webpage to which other pages may link.
<a name="bookmark"></a> and
<a href="#bookmark">link</a> are examples. (Note that in XHTML, <a name= is replaced by <a id= .)

ANSI. American National Standards Institute.

Applet. This is a small Java program which is part of a webpage. Usually it is graphics, arithmetic and/or link related.

Archie. An archaic method of finding files on an accessible FTP site. You had to know precisely which file you were looking for. Directories and Search Engines have largely replaced Archie programs.

ARPANet. Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Now you're deep into the history of the Internet. Back in the 60's the Web was really a US Department of Defense wide area network experiment to see what would happen to communications in case of a nuclear war.

ASCII. American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Usually refers to the character set made up of plain text A-Z, 0-9, and command characters (no special text formatting codes). It is based on the digital numbers 0 through 127 or, more properly, binary 0000000 through 1111111.

Asynchronous. A modem-type connection which does not use a "clock" or timing signal.

Attribute. A setting for a tag. Acting as an "adjective" for want of a better term, it tells the item how to function. For example, in
<font face="Courier" color="#0000ff"> the color entry is the attribute, providing the color "blue".

AU. A format for transmitting sounds on the Internet.

Autoresponder. A feature offered by a Web host so that when a form is submitted or an email sent, a standard email is automatically sent to the enquirer.

AVI. Audio Video Interleave. A video format.

Bandwidth. The speed with which data can be transmitted. "Ancient" systems with audio hookups operated at 300 baud. These days, many dial-up telephone based systems run at 56 Kbps. A T1 line runs some 25 times faster than that. On an inter-hub T3 (44.7 Mbps) that which takes 30 seconds to download at 56 Kbps takes about one second. However, at your PC the data still comes and goes at the speed of the slowest part of the network... your 56K dial-up line. Audio and video files chew up a lot of bandwidth. "Bandwidth" is sometimes used synonymously with transfer.

However, "bandwidth" is not quite the same as "transfer." Transfer measures the amount of data which can move. Assuming an 8-bit byte, one byte holds one character of information. A Kilobyte of information is not 1,000 bytes, but 1,024 bytes (it's measured in binary -- Base 2 -- not Base 10.

Meanwhile, 1 Kbps (1 kilobit per second) equals only 1,000 bits of data transmitted -- the "standard" meaning of Kilo. So, 56 Kbps = 56,000 bits of data / 8 bits/byte = 7,000 bytes being moved in that second.

Such a modem ships out about 420,000 bytes per minute. ..."About," because 7,000 x 60 seconds assumes maximum speed -- that there are no delays along the communications line. And, 420,000 / 1,024 = 410.15 Kb (Kilobytes) of data. So, simply divide your file size by 410.15 to get an idea of how long it will take to download data at 56 Kbps at maximum efficiency.

A Megabyte, then, takes 1,024 Kb / 410.15 = 2.4967 = 2.5 Minutes to download via a 56 Kbps line in peak form.

Base64. A byte counts from 0-255 (128+64+32+16+8+4+2+1). See Bit, Byte and Hexadecimal. When you look at the message source code of an email and see a block of characters like "0bWw+DQoNCjxo," then that's Base64. A Base64 element takes three 8-bit bytes. In the what-appears-to-be-strange ways that computers do things, these three bytes are represented by four characters. But they use 6 bit bytes, not 8-bit. (You have permission to scream now.) Six bits count up to 64 points, (32+16+8+4+2+1) from 0-63. Hence the name, "Base64."

In six bits you can fit the numbers 0-9, 26 lowercase characters, 26 uppercase characters and even '+' and '/'. Three 8-bit bytes = 3 x 8 = 24 "whatevers" / 6 = the 4 characters mentioned above. Base64 is a way of encoding data using only ASCII printable characters, but which sends content other than ASCII text via email.

Baud. The speed of transmission. Archaic term. Sending 4-bit characters at 300 baud would translate to 1,200 bits per second. In a modern world of 32-bit characters, you should ll never hear about baud speeds again. It's all kbps.

Bit. Binary digit. Computers are a yes/no base-2 world. A switch is either on (1) or off (0). It is the smallest piece of information in a computer. Bits are additive. So, 0000 = 0, 0001 = 1, 0010 = 2, 0011 = 3, 0100 = 4, 1000 = 8, and 1111 = 15. Traditionally, 8 bits = one byte. 4 bits (never used any more) = a nibble. And 2 bits = a niblet (don't blame us).

BMP. Bit map. A graphics file format. See raster graphic.

Boolean. True or False. A Boolean query at a search engine uses and/or/not operators. Bacon AND eggs. Bacon OR eggs. Bacon NOT eggs. This can also be expressed with +/-. + means AND. The - means NOT. Bacon + eggs. Bacon - eggs. It varies with the search engine. At Google, for instance, you can search for synonyms using a tilde. Bacon ~ eggs. To search only sites which refer to a specific domain, add a colon and the domain name. Bacon AND eggs : www.usda.gov

Blog. A journal kept on the Internet, from weB LOG. Postings are usually kept in chronological order, most recent first.

BPS. Bits per second. Transmission speed. Kbps = Kilobits per second. See bandwidth.

Broadband. Ability to send several signals at the same time, such as in cable TV.

Browser. A program which displays website pages. Microsoft® Internet Explorer®, Mozilla Firefox® and Netscape Browser® are examples of browsers.See also text browser.

Byte. Traditionally, one character of information, made up of 8 bits. See bit.

Cache. Actually from the Latin "coactare," to compel. The Internet is fast because traffic is reduced by cache. Going back to a page? Your computer doesn't even go out on the Web to retrieve it -- it looks at its local cache in memory and retrieves that, instead. If it's not there, your browser goes out to your Internet server. That computer will check its own server (or proxy) cache, to see if you or someone else has retrieved the page, and thus stored it there. If it's not there, your server ventures further out on the Web. How to cut through all the "feldercarb" and know that you have the most recent page from that website ... simply click your [Refresh] key.

CD-ROM. Compact Disk-Read Only Memory. Your computer may have a read-only drive or a read/write (CD/R) drive. Data is encoded optically on the disk.

CGI. Common gateway interface. Most websites have a cgi-bin folder. Software that "talks" to the server is usually stored here. If you have an email form on your website, it may reference a a related email program which resides in the cgi-bin folder.

Client. Simply put, your Web browser is the client (local program), and the website is on the server. Applications are often described as client-side or server-side to describe whence they operate.

Cloaking. Hiding page content. Originally intended to prevent thieves, it has been greatly misused. The bottom line is that search engines don't get to "see" the same page which the website visitor sees. That allows spam. That, in turn, makes it one great way to get your entire website banned from search engines.

Co-located server. Your server is on a network owned by someone else.

Comment. Text placed within an HTML tags <!-- and --> so that they will not appear on a browser.

Cookie. A text file which the server places on your computer.

Cracker. A person who breaks into computer systems and commits other criminal acts using a computer. See also hacker.

Crawler. See spider.

CSS. Cascading style sheet. Sets of instructions, such as character styles (type font, size, weight, color) are kept in a single, separate file. This means the task does not have to be repeated on each webpage. Less overhead = faster download time. CSS also means easier site maintenance for your Webmaster. Most modern browsers can handle it. W3C has compiled a list of CSS-compatible browsers, (at this page, scroll down to "CSS Browsers.")

Cyberspace. A generic term referring to the information accessible on a network.