Glossary

Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)

Apple Event

Used by applications and AppleScript to communicate and exchange information with each other.

AppleScript

Apple Computer's Apple Event based scripting language for the Macintosh Operating System.

Application

An individual software program.

Arachnerd

Archie

Network service for searching ftp sites.

ARPA

see Advanced Research Projects Agency.

ARPANET

ARPA computer network.

bandwidth

The available space for transmitting information.

Browser

client

Program/computer that accesses the services of another program/computer.

compile

The process of converting a set of high(er)-level instructions (such as C or Pascal source code) into low(er)-level format (such as machine-code). Computer applications are generally 'compiled' from programming source code files.

dither

The process of patterning dots of color in an image to achieve the effect of more colors than the current bit-depth permits.

Document Type Description (DTD)

part of SGML. Used to define the elements of a document.

DTD

see Document Type Description.

Electronic Mail

E-Mail

see Electronic Mail.

File Transfer Protocol

Finger

Tool/service for finding information about a user.

ftp

see File Transfer Protocol

GIF

see Graphic Interchange Format.

Gopher

Graphic Interchange Format (GIF)

HTML

see HyperText Markup Language.

HTTP

see HyperText Transfer Protocol.

HyperCard

A HyperText/Media development system produced by Apple Computer, Inc.

hyperlink

hypermedia

hypertext

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

internet

Internet Protocol (IP)

IP

see Internet Protocol.

ISO-8859

Character set defined by International Standards Organization

JPEG

see Joint Photographers Engineering Group.

Joint Photographers Engineering Group (JPEG)

man page

Online reference documentation on UNIX systems.

MIME

see Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension

Motion Picture Engineering Group (MPEG)

MPEG

see Motion Picture Engineering Group.

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension

Method for differentiating file formats

National Science Foundation

U.S. organization that manages the NSFnet to connect major research institutions and campuses in the U.S.

Network

A collection of computers that can communicate with each other.

Network News Transfer Protocol

NNTP

see Network News Transfer Protocol

NSF

see National Science Foundation

OpenTransport

The new networking 'layer' for the Macintosh OS.

Point to Point Protocol (PPP)

PPP

see Point to Point Protocol.

QuickTime

A video and audio file format created by Apple Computer, Inc.

Rich Text Format (RTF)

An interchange format for formatted text documents.

RTF

see Rich Text Format.

round-robin

Method used by DNS server to spread the load for one domain name across a number of machines.

Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP)

server

SGML

see Standard Generalized Markup Language.

SLIP

see Serial Line Internet Protocol.

Source Code

The 'code' in which a program or script is written in. This code is usually read by a compiler which turns it into an application.

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)

Status

When used to refer to the 'status' of a program (including utilities) this is meant as how complete or bug free a program is. The statuses used in this documentation, in order from buggiest to cleanest, are: development, alpha, beta, release.

Sun audio (AU)

TCP

see Transmission Control Protocol.

Telnet

Provides remote login capability.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

Standardized method for representing documents and network access points.

URL

see Uniform Resource Locator.

USENET

Global newsgroup network.

Veronica

Network service for searching Gopher space.

Viewer

An application with which you can view a file or document. Usually used to mean an application used to view file formats that the www browser you are using does not have built in support for.

Virtual Reality Modeling Language

3-D modeling language standard designed for network application.

VRML

see Virtual Reality Modeling Language

VMDL

File format produced by Virtus tools for VRML browsers.

WAIS

see Wide Area Information Server.

Web-Crawler, Spider

wembaster

A title sometimes used to refer to the person technical responsible for administering a web server.

Wide Area Information Server (WAIS)

Service for searching network databases.

World Wide Web

WWW

see World Wide Web

X-bitmap

1-bit image file format support by X-Windows systems.

XBM

see X-bitmap

XCMD

External Command module for HyperCard.