bookmark 
Just like the cardboard ones you
stick into a printed book, a bookmark is a placeholder to a particular URL, or web
address, that you set once into your Internet browser software for ready access later.
Bookmarks are typically used to record a site you want to return to,browser
"Browser" is the
generic term for any piece of software that lets you see web pages. You may use the
Netscape Navigator browser (currently the most popular browser in the world), or perhaps
you use the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser or a flavor of Mosaic. The America Online
software also includes a browser. The very first web browsers, such as Lynx, only allowed
users to see the text of web pages. The Mosaic browser was the first to
introduce graphics to the mix.
chat
- Online chat is just like
chatting over tea with friends, except the participants may be anywhere in the world, and
the words are typed instead of spoken. Chat takes place in real time or one you visit
regularly.
cookie
If you've ever wandered
around a web shopping mall throwing goodies into a virtual shopping cart, you've
been making web cookies. A cookie is a small piece of information that a web server (such
as the one that holds the web shopping mall) sends to your browser to hold onto until it's
time for the server to read it. For
instance, the cookie made while you shop around a web mall contains a list of the items
you're planning to
purchase. When you head to the checkout desk, the server collects the cookie from your
browser to see what you're buying. Cookies also have expiration dates and instructions
about which sites can "eat" them, along with security information to protect
your buying info. Alphabet Soup Watch: Why do they call it a cookie, anyway? No reason;
they just wanted a cute name. (An alternate view is that they were
thinking of a "magic cookie" in Dungeons and Dragons, or of the cute
"cookie monster" pseudo-virus that made the rounds on the Net for
many years.)
- domain
Just as a PC's file extensions
(such as .doc for MS Word files) give some indication of what kind of file it is, the last
part of an Internet site's domain name tells what kind of site it is. The most rapidly
expanding of these is ".com," as in www.yahoo.com, our address.
Other common ones include .edu, for educational institutions, .gov for government, and
.mil, for military sites. For sites based outside the U.S., there are plenty others. You
can guess the origin of .uk, for instance. It gets more confusing once you start dealing
with other countries' sub-domains, such as the UK's ".ac" for academic.
- download
You've probably put software on
your computer by putting diskettes into a disk drive. Online, you can get software by
downloading it. The software sits on Computer X; you use your browser or an FTP
(file-transfer protocol) program to find and retrieve the software to your computer. If
you had software you wanted to send to another computer, you'd reverse the process; this
is known as "uploading."
e-commerce
Short for electronic commerce.
Conducting business on-line. This includes,
for example, buying and selling products with digital cash and via Electronic Data
Interchange (EDI).
email
Email is electronic mail. It's
the digital, packetized means of transmitting messages via phone lines to other people's
computers using an online service or ISP.
FTP
You've probably put software on
your computer by putting diskettes into a disk drive. Online, you can get
software by downloading it. The software sits on Computer X; you use your browser or an
FTP
(file-transfer protocol) program to find and retrieve the software to your computer. If
you had software you wanted to send to another computer, you'd reverse the process; this
is
graphics
The word "graphic"
refers to any file that stores an electronic version of a picture. The format used may
range in detail from a black-and-white line-art drawing to a high-resolution photo using
millions of colors. Graphic file types include .EPS, .GIF, .JPG, .PCX, and .TIF.
interactive
Although it's one of the newly
minted buzzwords of the Internet, along with "information superhighway" and
"surfing," "interactive" refers to any technology that allows the user
to exchange information with a computer program, so that the user and the program
"interact." This interaction can be as simple as clicking buttons or typing
something in, or as complex as steering a car or navigating a virtual world. With such a
wide definition, it's no wonder the word has been tossed around so much as to make it
completely meaningless.
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The interface is what you see when
you look at your monitor -- the collection of words, pictures, buttons, menus, and other
stuff that lets you do things. Every computer program you use has an interface; some are
better (easier to use, more attractive, understandable, "intuitive") and some
are worse. (The very best interfaces ae often carefully researched, tested, and designed
to ensure that people are able to use them easily.) You'll also hear talk about the
"graphical interfaces" of the Mac and Windows systems, each of which naturally
affects the interfaces of individual programs that run on the Mac or the PC. In a broader
sense, the point of connection between any two parts of the computer (modem and main
computer, keyboard and mouse for you Mac users) is an interface. Yes, this means you're
part of the computer!
Internet
An internet can refer to
any distributed
network of computers, but you probably want to know about the Internet with a capital
"I." Simply put, it's the largest of the internets. But at its heart, it's just
a bunch of computers all over the world hooked up to one another so they can exchange
information. To exchange information they use protocols such as FTP, Gopher, and Hypertext
Transport Protocol or HTTP (the protocol that transfers World Wide Web information.)
InterNIC
Internet Network
Information Center (or InterNIC), a private company funded in part by the National Science
Foundation (whose NSFnet evolved into the Internet as we now know it). This clearinghouse
keeps tabs on all registered domains -- whether or not the
domains are currently in use -- and handles registration for newcomers.
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IP
Internet Protocol (or IP)
is the packet-switching protocol through which everything happens on the Internet. More
specifically, it's the underlying network beneath TCP/IP that creates the addressing
scheme that allows computers to find each other. The Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF), a group of experts, vendors, and end-users, helps to define and refine each
successive
IP address
Just as postal addresses
have been codified so that snail mail can be delivered correctly -- name on the first
line, company name on the second line, street address third, etc.-- IP addresses have been
codified to allow Internet information (from Web pages to e-mail) to be delivered
correctly. To the Internet, a given server's IP address is all numbers and dots in the
format "000.000.000.0," but since humans aren't as good as computers at
remembering numbers, IP numeric addresses also have a textual representation. The usual
format is [machine name].[sponsoring organization].[type of organization, such as
".com"].
ISP
An "ISP"
(Internet service provider) is a company that provides Internet access to consumers. Your
communications software makes a local call to your ISP, which in turn
connects to the Internet through high-speed phone lines (see "T1"). Once
connected, you can exchange e-mail, surf the Web, or perform any other Internet
activities.
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Link
The connection between one
web page and another. On the Web, a link can be either text or graphics. Often a browser
will indicate links by coloring them differently than plain text or graphics.
Sometimes, links are referred to as "hyperlinks" or even "hotlinks."
URL
- Just as every person on the Net has a unique email address, every file and page on the
We;
b has a unique URL. The
URL is the address of a web page. You can see the URL for the web page you're on now; look
up above the page to the thin white horizontal box. The jumble of letters in there is the
URL. The first part of the URL (http) tells the browser it's looking for a web page. The
rest gives the name of the computer that holds the page (www.yahoo.com), the directory
it's in (resources/glossary) and the name of the file that makes up the page (g3.html).
You can instantly jump to any page on the Web by typing the page's URL into the white box.
Alphabet Soup Watch: URL stands for "Uniform Resource Locator." http stands for
"Hypertext Transfer Protocol."
World Wide Web
Also called WWW, W3, or
just the Web, the World Wide Web is the whole gamut of hypertext servers
that let HTML programmers present virtual, on-screen pages combining text, graphics,
audio, and other file types -- not to mention links to other pages.
Users point and click to access World Wide Web pages using browser software, such as
Netscape
Navigator, which provides the front-end once the Internet connection is actually
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