The web terminology below is cited from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that has been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. The resources have been modified and shorten for this blog. You will find the terminology below throughout my blog. This page serves as a resource to define those terms.
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to Web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements and games. More recently, it has been positioned as a tool for “Rich Internet Applications” (“RIAs”). Flash manipulates vector and raster graphics to provide animation of text, drawings, and still images. It supports bidirectional streaming of audio and video, and it can capture user input via mouse, keyboard, microphone, and camera. Flash contains an Object-oriented language called ActionScript.
Adobe Photoshop is a graphics-editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Photoshop has ties with other Adobe software for media editing, animation, and authoring. The .PSD (Photoshop Document), Photoshop’s native format, stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts.
Codec encodes a data stream or signal for transmission, storage or encryption, or decodes it for playback or editing. Codecs are used in videoconferencing, streaming media and video editing applications.
Favicon (short for favorites icon), also known as a shortcut icon, website icon, URL icon, or bookmark icon is a 16×16 or 32×32 pixel square icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such an icon and install it into a website (or webpage) by several means, and most graphical web browsers will then make use of it. Browsers that provide favicon support typically display a page’s favicon in the browser’s address bar and next to the page’s name in a list of bookmarks.
FLV (Flash Video) is a container file format used to deliver video over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player. There are two different video file formats known as Flash Video: FLV and F4V. Video FLV files usually contain material encoded with codecs following the Sorenson Spark or VP6 video compression formats.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a bitmap image format. The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel thus allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colors. The colors are chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame. The color limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.
H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC (Advanced Video Coding) is a standard for video compression. H.264 is used in such applications as players for Blu-ray Discs, videos from YouTube and the iTunes Store, web software such as the Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight, broadcast services for DVB and SBTVD, direct-broadcast satellite television services, cable television services, and real-time videoconferencing.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the predominant markup language for web pages. A markup language is a set of markup tags, and HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages. HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of “tags” surrounded by angle brackets (e.g. <html>) within the web page content.
Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (for example, this is used by Google to determine the Page Rank of a webpage). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.
JavaScript has become one of the most popular programming languages on the web. JavaScript is primarily used in the form of client-side JavaScript, implemented as part of a web browser in order to provide enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites. However, its use in applications outside web pages is also significant.
JPEG (pronounced /ˈdʒeɪpɛɡ/, jay-peg) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital photography (image). The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality. JPEG/Exif is the most common image format used by digital cameras and other photographic image-capture devices.
JQuery is a cross-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. JQuery also provides capabilities for developers to create plug-ins on top of the JavaScript library. Using these facilities, developers are able to create abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, theme-able widgets. This contributes to the creation of powerful and dynamic web pages.
Metadata is loosely defined as data about data. Metadata is traditionally found in the card catalogs of libraries and is today commonly used to describe three aspects of digital documents and data: 1) definition, 2) structure and 3) administration. By describing the contents and context of data files, the quality of the original data/files is greatly increased. For example, a webpage may include metadata specifying what language it’s written in, what tools were used to create it, and where to go for more on the subject, allowing browsers to automatically improve the experience of users.
MPEG-4 is a collection of methods defining compression of audio and visual (AV) digital data. MPEG-4 enables different software and hardware developers to create multimedia objects possessing better abilities of adaptability and flexibility to improve the quality of such services and technologies as digital television, animation graphics, the World Wide Web and their extensions. It is non-proprietary compression.
On2 TrueMotion VP6 is a proprietary lossy video compression format and video codec. Adobe Flash, Flash Video, and JavaFX media files commonly use this codec.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics, also pronounced/ˈpɪŋ/ping) is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG was created to improve upon and replace GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) as an image-file format. PNG supports palette-based images (with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), grayscale images (with or without alpha channel), and RGB images (with or without alpha channel). PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not for print graphics, and therefore does not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK.
Raster graphics image or bitmap is a data structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels or points of color viewable via a monitor, paper, or other display medium. Raster graphics are resolution dependent. They cannot scale up to an arbitrary resolution without loss of apparent quality. This property contrasts with the capabilities of vector graphics, which easily scale up to the quality of the device rendering them.
SEO (Search engine optimization) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for.
Sorenson codec may refer to either of three proprietary video codecs: Sorenson Video, Sorenson Video 3 or Sorenson Spark. Sorenson Video is used in Apple’s QuickTime and Sorenson Spark in Adobe Flash. Sorenson Spark is the required video compression format for Flash Player 6 and 7.
SWF (an abbreviation for “ShockWave Flash”) is a file format for multimedia, vector graphics and ActionScript in the Adobe Flash environment. SWF functions as the dominant format for displaying “animated” vector graphics on the Web. SWF files can be generated from within several Adobe products: Flash, Flash Builder.
TinyURL is a URL shortening service, a web service that provides short aliases for redirection of long URLs. Kevin Gilbertson, a web developer, launched the service in January 2002 so that he would be able to link directly to newsgroup postings that frequently had long and cumbersome addresses.
URL describes a location and means for obtaining a resource. In computing, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it. The best-known example of a URL is the address of a web page on the World Wide Web, e.g. http://www.example.com
Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based on mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics.
Website (also spelled Web site) is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed relative to a common Uniform Resource Locator (URL), often consisting of only the domain name, or the IP address, and the root path (‘/’) in an Internet Protocol-based network. A web site is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network.
