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Web Design Lingo Glossary
Background
The background is like a canvas on top of which
characters and graphics are placed. Some monitors
allow you to control the color or shading of the
background. Also referred to as a Background
Tile.
Browser
Short for Web browser, a software application
used to locate and display Web pages. The two most
popular browsers are Netscape Navigator and
Microsoft Internet Explorer. In the 90's Navigator ruled, but Microsoft IE has taken over most of the market share. Both of these are
graphical browsers, which means that they can
display graphics as well as text.
More
on browsers
Domain (top-level domain or Domain name)
On the Internet, domains are attached to an
IP address. All devices sharing a common part of
the IP address are said to be in the same
domain. A domain name is SOMETHING.COM or NAME.SOMETHING
DPI
Dots Per Inch - a measurement for graphics and image files.
Flash
A bandwidth friendly and browser independent
vector-graphic animation technology made by Macromedia. As long as
different browsers are equipped with the necessary
plug-ins, Flash animations will look the
same. Flash allows for all kinds of interactive animation no possible with plain HTML or DHTML
Font (aka Type-Face)
A design for a set of characters. A font is the
combination of typeface and other qualities, such
as size, pitch, and spacing.
Frames
A feature supported by most modern Web browsers
than enables the Web author to divide the browser
display area into two or more sections (frames).
The contents of each frame are taken from a
different Web page. Frames provide great
flexibility in designing Web pages, but many
designers avoid them because they are hard to index in search engines correctly.
More
on Frames
GIF-
Pronounced jiff or giff (hard g) stands for
graphics interchange format, a bit-mapped graphics
file format used by the World Wide Web. GIF
supports color and various resolutions. It also
includes data compression, making it especially
effective for scanned photos.
Hexadecimal
Colors
Code used in HTML documents to specify the
color of text and backgrounds displayed in web
environments such as Netscape. Example #FFFFFF is white in html> each 2 digit section is a rgb value. The first two are the red value, the second are the green, and the third set are blue. This allows thousands of colors to be created with the six digit hex value.
More
on choosing Colors
HomePage (Home, Index)
The main page or Index page of a Web site. Typically, the
home page serves as an index or table of contents
to other documents stored at the site.
Hosting (Web hosting)
A website must be on a computer that is connected to the internet, you pay a monthly fee to keep your web site up on a host. See Hosting 2020
HTML (HTM)
Short for HyperText Markup Language, the
authoring language used to create documents on the
World Wide Web. HTML defines the structure and
layout of a Web document by using a variety of tags
and attributes.
ISP
Short for Internet Service Provider, a company
that provides access to the Internet. For a monthly
fee, the service provider gives you a software
package, username, password and access phone
number.
JPEG (JPG)
("Jay - peg")
Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, and
pronounced jay-peg. JPEG is a lossy compression
technique for color images. Although it can reduce
files sizes to about 5% of their normal size, some
detail is lost in the compression.
Link (aka HREF aka Anchor)
In hypertext systems, such as the World Wide
Web, a link is a reference to another document.
Such links are sometimes called hot links because
they take you to other document when you click on
them. A link ususally leads to another URL or URI (see below)
Menu (Navigation)
You can enter another area on a site by simply
pointing and clicking on a menu item. This is a list of links on a website.
MouseOver
A JavaScript element that triggers a change on
an item (usually a graphic) in a Web page when the
mouse passes over it. The change usually signifies
that the item is a link to related or additional
information. Mouseovers are widely used in
Navigation Bars, pop-up boxes, and/or form
submissions.
Resolution
Refers to the sharpness and clarity of an
image or to the settings of a monitor. Most monitors run at 800x600 or 1024x768 DPI Resolution
Scrolling
To view consecutive lines of data on the
display screen. The term scroll means that once the
screen is full, each new line appears at the edge
of the screen and all other lines move over one
position. For example, when you scroll down, each
new line appears at the bottom of the screen and
all the other lines move up one row, so that the
top line disappears.
The term
vertical scrolling refers to the ability to scroll
up or down. Horizontal scrolling means that the
data moves sideways.
In theory,
the display should move smoothly, as if it were a
piece of paper being moved up, down, or sideways.
In practice, however, scrolling is not always so
smooth.
The scrolling
method of viewing documents does not recognize page
boundaries. One advantage to scrolling, therefore,
is that you can look at the end of one page and the
beginning of the next page at the same time.
Splash
Page
A page in a Web site that the user sees first
before being given the option to continue to the
main content of the site. Splash pages are used to
promote a company, service or product or are used
to inform the user of what kind of software or
browser is necessary in order to view the rest of
the site's pages. Often a splash page will consist
of animated graphics and sounds that entice the
user into exploring the rest of the Web site. Some
splash pages will bring the user to the main Web
site automatically, and some require the user to
click on a link that will load the main
page.
SubPage
Any of the inside pages of a website. The home
page menu contains links into the sites
subpages.
Table
Refers to data arranged in rows and columns. A
spreadsheet, for example, is a table.
URL (URI)
Abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator, the
global address of documents and other resources on
the World Wide Web.
Window
(1) An enclosed, rectangular area on a display
screen. Most modern operating systems and
applications have graphical user interfaces (GUIs)
that let you divide your display into several
windows. Within each window, you can run a
different program or display different data.
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