Web Glossary

We’re not going to even try to list everything, but a few essential terms may make your search for a developer less daunting!

AJAX
An acronym for “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”. Ajax can be everything from a way to replace text on a page without having to go to a new page to entire interactive web applications that can change the way you and your customers do business.

CSS
Cascading Style Sheets allow the designer much better control of the user experience and events. They can enable a design to change based on user preference (making font sizes larger or smaller) or to make layouts compatible between browsers and operating systems.

DHTML
Dynamic HTML is an extension of HTML that enables more control of entities on the web page and overall layout. DHTML is often used in concert with style sheets to enhance the user experience.

DOM
“Document Object Model” a standard for representing documents in a platform and language neutral manner. This allows your web-page to be seen across language and platforms in a consistent manner. The DOM is also the basis for a variety of application programming interfaces.

Flash
First poularized by Macromedia as an animation tool, Flash is now present on 90% of modern computers and has gone way beyond being an animation tool. Flash can make the user interface more friendly and manageable for a number of web applications and data driven pages. It can also significantly reduce the file size or load time of everything from navigational elements to videos.

FLV
Flash can compress your video by as much as 75% and deliver it in a package that 90% of modern browsers can see, with a free plug-in for those who haven’t upgraded yet. As seen on you-tube. By the way, you-tube compression si what makes some of the videos blurry, this can easily be remedied by skilled manipulation of compression ratios.

HTML
Hyper Text Mark-Up Language is the primary language in which web pages are written.

Javascript
Javascript is a scripting language developed by Netscape and is embedded in a web page. Often called J-script it’s the engine behind drop-down menus, and respond to a variety of user events like mouse-overs, clicks and submit buttons, forms that calculate values, and generally control the browser and it’s DOM.

LAMP
A set of open source programs often used together to run dynamic Web sites or servers:Linux, (OS), Apache, (Web server), MySQL, (database management system); and one (or all) of these scripting languages: Perl, PHP, Python.

MySQL
(pronounced "my ess cue el") is an open-source relational database management system. Often used in concert with PHP.

PHP
(Hypertext Pre-processor) is an open-source server side HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic web pages. Because PHP is excuted on the server, the code is transparent to the user and offers a certain level of security.

Web 2.0
The "symantic web", a cool new open and airy design feel, less is more, the banning of dropdowns. Web 2.0 has been said to include all of these features. It's also described as the next generation of on-line applications, freeing you from your desktop, and allowing you to use online apps and storage from anywhere any time.

XHTML
eXtensible HyperText Markup Language is a hybrid between HTML and XML. Not all browsers support straight XML yet, so a hybrid allows a solution until the browsers catch up. May replace HTML as a standard at some point soon.

XML
Extensible Markup Language is a flexible way to combine common information formats and share that information on the web. XML is visible online in RSS feeds, processing data streams from databases, aggregators like Wikipedia, Digg and Minibox, and lots of other cool tools.