HERE ARE SOME COMMON TERMS RELATING TO
THE WEB, SERVERS AND INTERNET, EXPLAINED FOR YOUR KNOWLEDGE

ARPANET
ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECT AGENCY NETWORK

ASCII
AMERICAN STANDARD CODE FOR INFORMATION INTERCHANGE

ASP
ASP stands for Active Server Pages. This is another form of programming that is only available on servers that run NT for their Operating System.

AUTORESPONDER
Not surprisingly, an Autoresponder automatically responds to anyone that sends mail to it. These are used for a few things, including vacation notices and easy dissemination of information. If you had a vacation autoresponder for instance, you could turn it on when you leave, and anyone that sends mail to your address while you're gone will get an immediate response stating that you are out of town. Businesses use Autoresponders for getting sale information, new product announcements, e-mail brochures and more out to interested customers.

BANDWIDTH
Usually measured in bits-per-second, it is the amount of stuff you can send through a connection. A full page of English text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 15,000 bits in one second. Full-motion full-screen video would require roughly 10,000,000 bits per second, depending on compression.

Internet Servers are connected to the Internet backbone on a high-speed data link usually on a T-3, T-1 or an ISDN speed links.

A T-3 link can transfer 44.736 M-bits/sec, T-1 can handle 1.5 M bits/sec, while ISDN can only transmit information at a rate of 128 K bits per second.

Pugmarks' Servers are linked on high speed T-3 multiple gateway links capable of handling over 10 million hits per day.

CGI
CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. CGI allows HTML pages to interact with programming applications.

COOKIE
Small bits of data that a web page asks a browser to store on a users computer,either in RAM or on the Hard drive.

DHTML
DYNAMIC HTML

DNS
DOMAIN NAME SERVER

DOMAIN NAME
A Domain Name is much like a trademark or a license. It allows people to find your website by name instead of by number. It also allows customers to have a much more professional look because their website can be http://www.THEIRBUSINESSNAME.com instead of http://www.PROVIDERNAME.com/businessname. There can only be one of any Domain name in the world. If http://www.myweb.com is already registered by another company, then you must find a name that is not yet registered. Domain names can be only 63 charecters long in total. This includes the .com at the end but does not include the http://www at the beginning.

It is the 'unique name' that identifies an Internet site. Domain Names always have two or more parts, separated by dots. The part on the left is the most specific, and the part on the right is the most general. A given machine may have more than one Domain Name but a given Domain Name points to only one machine. For example, the domain names:

• pugmarks.com
• pugmarks.net
• aiims.edu
• apcf.org

can all refer to the same machine, but each domain name can refer to no more than one machine. Usually, all of the machines on a given Network will have the same extension as the right-hand portion of their Domain Names (pugmarks.net in the examples above). It is also possible for a Domain Name to exist but not be connected to an actual machine. This is often done so that a group or business can have an Internet e-mail address without having to establish a real Internet site. In these cases, some real Internet machine must handle the mail on behalf of the listed Domain Name.

E-MAIL
E-mail is Electronic Mail. It is a way of sending letters, sales notices, brochures, and more over the Internet. E-mail is primarily text based, however, so you must be creative in how you send sales notices and brochures when doing it via e-mail.

E-MAIL ALIASE
An E-mail aliase account is sometimes called a forwarding account. This type of e-mail allows you to appear to have an address on one domain, yet behind the scenes the mail is forwarded on to your real e-mail account.

EMAIL POP
An e-mail POP account is an actual physical e-mail box and User ID located on the server for which the address is made. When e-mail is sent to a real POP account, the mail is stored on the server until the user logs in with their e-mail software and downloads it.

FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL(FTP)
FTP is a very common method of moving files between two Internet sites. it is a special way to login to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. There are many Internet sites that have established publicly accessible repositories of material that can be obtained using FTP, by logging in using the account name 'anonymous'. Thus, these sites are called anonymous FTP servers.

HOST
In IPX Network this term is usually reserved for a server or a machine offering services to the LAN or WAN. An IPX based work station is not normally considered a host, IPX workstation, generally, doesn't make services available to the rest of the network.

On TCP/IP networks, a host is either a workstation or a server. On IP network, both workstations and servers can offer services to the network. A workstation, for example, can commonly respond to PING requests. PING is the IP utility that briefly communicates with a remote host to determine the host status.

HOST NAMES
Each host on IP Network is assigned a unique software address called an Internet or IP address. This address uniquely identifies each host within your internet work. By convention, this address is usually represented in dotted decimal notation such as the address 217.17.20.19.

Each segment or network on your internet work is also assigned a network address that represents a portion of the IP address of each host on the network. From a user point of view, it is convenient to associate a name to each hosts or network.

HOST TABLES
Host Tables is an ASCII file containing the names and address of systems that you commonly access. For example, if you are trying to establish a telnet session with the host Pugmarks.com, the file is examined to find internet address. The file generally look like this

202.19.162.27 Pugmarks.com.

HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. HTML is a collection of platform-independent styles (indicated by markup tags) that define the various components of a World Wide Web document. HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva. Confusing? OK: Basically HTML is the language used to make web pages.

HYPERTEXT LINKS
A Hypertext Link is a method of embedding a URL into an object, such as a segment of text, or an image. When this object is clicked on the browser then addresses the embedded URL to retrieve its WWW document. Hypertext Links are responsible for the "world wide" aspect of the web, as they make any Web server a simple click away from any other Web server. As a general rule of thumb, any colored words and graphics are normally linked and can be clicked on.

IMAP

INTERACTIVE MAIL ACCESS PROTOCOL

1. In communications: the difference between the highest and lowest frequencies available for transmission in any given range.

2. In Networking: The transmission capacity of a computer or a communication channel stated in mega bits per second. Eg:

INTERNET
The Internet is the catch-all word used to describe the massive world-wide network of computers. The word "internet" literally means "network of networks". In itself, the Internet is comprised of thousands of smaller regional networks scattered throughout the globe. On any given day it connects roughly 50 million users in over 70 countries. It is the communication backbone that ties together computers from all around the world commonly known as the "Information Superhighway." The Internet includes such interfaces and standards as: World Wide Web, FTP, NNTP, Telnet, and Gopher.

INTERNIC
Internic is the domain name licensing authority for the United States.

INTERANET
A private network inside a company or organization that uses the same kind of software and technologies that you would find on the public Internet, but that is only for internal use.

As the Internet has become more popular, many of the tools used on the Internet are being used in private networks. For example, many companies have web servers that are available only to employees. Intranets are ideal places to host information only for a specific group of people or employees.

Note: An Intranet may not actually be an internet -- it may simply be a network.

IRC
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. IRC is a massive network of text based chat channels (rooms) and users all across the world.

ISP
ISP stands for "Internet Service Provider." These are private fee-based companies that provide dial-up access to the Internet via SLP, PPP, or TCP/IP.
Examples: Earthlink, Netcom, MSN

Note: AOL is not a real ISP because they use proprietary software. Users do not have access to mail servers and various other Internet services when using AOL.

ISAP
MICROSOFT INTERNET INFORMATION SERVER

ISDN
INTEGERATED SERVICES DIGITAL NETWORK

JAVA
Java was developed as a response to problems programming in C++. It is intended to be a "simple, object oriented, cross-platform, high performance, multithreaded, dynamic" (1) programming language.

JAVASCRIPT
JavaScript is a mini version of Java. The advantages to JavaScript over Java are: simplified Doesn't have to be compiled the source code resides within your HTML document

LAN
LOCAL AREA NETWORK

MAN
METROPOL AREA NETWORK

MIRROR
Generally speaking, "to mirror" is to maintain an exact copy of something. Probably the most common use of this term on the Internet refers to "mirror sites" which are web sites or FTP sites that maintain exact copies of material originated at another location. This is usually in order to provide more widespread access to the resource.

Another common use of the term "mirror" refers to an arrangement where information is written to more than one hard disk simultaneously, so that if one disk fails, the computer keeps on working without losing anything.

NAME SERVER
Name servers are setup to maintain host addresses for each sub-domain or zone within the name space as well as to maintain the address of root name server. Using recursive, queries or referring clients to other servers, a DNS server is capable of resolving the IP address for any host in the Internet.

NIC (Network Information Center)
NIC is, generally, any office that handles information for a network. The most famous of these on the Internet is the InterNIC, which is where new domain names are registered.

NNTP
NETWORK NEWS TRANSFER PROTOCOL(protocol used to transfer usenet pieces on the internet)

NSAP
NETSCAPE COMMERCE AND ENTERPRISE SERVER

NTP
NETWORK TIME PROTOCOL ( protocol used to synchronize time between computers on Internet)

OPERATING SYSTEM
An Operating System is what runs your computer. Most computer users have most likely heard of "Windows 95", or "Windows 3.1", or "DOS", or "Macintosh". These are all operating systems that are normally used on private individual computers. A Computer that is used as a Web Server must also have an operating system. The two most common Operating systems used on Web Servers are Unix and NT.

PERL
Perl is a popular programming language used for creating interactive websites.

PROTOCOL
The must follow regulations that govern the transmission and receipt of information across a data communications link.Languages that computers use to talk to eachother.A set of standards that assures that different network products can work together.Any product using a given protocol should work with anyother product using the same protocol.

SERVER
A computer, or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running, e.g. 'Our mail server is down today, that’s why e-mail isn’t getting out.' A single server machine could have several different server software packages running on it, thus, providing many different servers to clients on the network.

SMTP
SIMPLE MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL

SPAM
"SPAM" mail is the practice of sending massive amounts of e-mail promotions or advertisements (and scams) to people that have not asked for it. Spam mail is controversial and there are many levels of definitions for it. Many times, spam e-mail lists are created by "harvesting" e-mail addresses from discussion boards and groups, chat rooms, IRC, and web pages. Pugmarks strictly prohibits sending spam from accounts on our servers.

SURFERS
A "surfer" is a colloquialism for a person browsing the web.

T-1
It is a leased-line connection capable of carrying data at 1,544,000 bits-per-second. At maximum theoretical capacity, a T-1 line could move a megabyte in less than 10 seconds. That is still not fast enough for full-screen, full-motion video for which you need at least 10,000,000 bits-per-second. T-1 is the fastest speed commonly used to connect networks to the Internet.

T-3
It is a leased-line connection capable of carrying data at 44,736,000 bits-per-second. This is more than enough for a full-screen, full-motion video.

TCP/IP
TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL/INTERNET PROTOCOL

URL
URL stands for "Uniform Resource Locator" or "Universal Resource Locator". It is a draft standard for specifying an object on the Internet, such as a file or newsgroup. The first part of the URL, before the colon, specifies the access method. The part of the URL after the colon is interpreted specific to the access method. In general, two slashes after the colon indicate a machine name (machine:port is also valid).

example: http://www.pugmarks.net

VIRTUAL SERVER
A Virtual Server is fully functioning Web Server that resides within the same physical location of a true Web Server. Multiple Virtual Servers can reside on a single Web Server. This technology sprang up in the mid 1990's and has allowed business and persons to have the benefits of a Web Server at a very feasible rate.

VSAT
Very small aperture terminal.It is small satellite terminal used for digital communications.

VSNL
VIDESH SANCHAR NIGAM LIMITED

WAN
WIDE AREA NETWORK

WEB BROWSER
A web browser is a software package that allows your computer, once connected to the Web, to fetch documents from Web Servers around the World, translate the HTML code in the documents and display the information to your screen.

examples: Netscape Navigator, Mosaic, MS Internet Explorer.

WEB SERVER
A Web Server is a computer on the World Wide Web (connected to the Internet Backbone) that stores HTML documents that can be retrieved via a Web Browser.

WWW (World Wide Web)
To put it simply, the World Wide Web is a point-and-click user-friendly Internet interface. It could also be considered the graphical extension of the Internet.

It can have two connotations.

First: the whole constellation of resources that can be accessed using Gopher, FTP, HTTP, telnet, USENET, WAIS and some other tools.

Second: the universe of hypertext servers (HTTP servers) which are the servers that allow text, graphics, sound files, etc. to be mixed together.

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