Glossary

Accessible: An accessible Web site is a site that is able to serve its content in an equivalent manner to all users whether or not they are using assistive technologies.
Accessibility Laws: Many countries around the world have laws that guarantee access to products, services, media and physical locations for disabled people; some of these laws apply to Web sites. In some countries general human rights law covers all instances of access including Web sites, and some countries have laws that specifically related to accessibility and the Web.
Authoring: Authoring is the process of making or writing a Web document using a mark-up language. This differs from the term programming as computer programming is associated with building software or writing small programs with specific functionality. The term coding, however, is often used for both computer programming and Web authoring.
Authoring Tools: Authoring tools are software programs used to help Web authors create Web pages. For example, FrontPage, Dreamweaver, Home Site and BBEdit are all authoring tools. Some content management systems may also be authoring tools.
Browsers: Browsers are software programs that allow a user to view images and read hypertext documents (i.e. Web pages). For example Mozilla, Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Safari are all browsers. Browsers are also included in the term user agents.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): Cascading Style Sheets contain declarations that describe how a document should be presented on the Web. CSS can be written for different media, can be part of an HTML document, or can be a separate file that is applied to multiple HTML documents.
Coding: Coding is a term commonly used to describe making or writing a Web document using a mark-up language. It is also used to describe programming
Content: Content is a term used to describe material offered for a user on a Web site. It can include text, audio files, images, Flash presentations and other files. The term content is often used to mean the material a viewer sees and not the coding that marks-up that material.
Device: Device, used in the context of discussions around the Web and Web standards, means an electronic instrument that is connected to the Internet. Usually this means a personal computer, but a device could be a cell phone, personal digital assistant, Braille reader or other adaptive technology for the disabled, or maybe one of those fancy Internet fridges!
DTD (Document Type Definition): A DTD a special document that outlines the rules of a particular document structure , such as for HTML. It lists the elements, attributes and entities, and defines the permitted relationships between them.
Extensible: A program or system that is capable of being extended or can be easily scaled in the future.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format): GIF is a common file format for graphics on the Web. Unisys owns the license to the compression algorithm used in GIF (called "LZW"), so companies which make use of this algorithm in their software are required to obtain a license from Unisys. In response, a patent-free graphics format, PNG, was developed. Read more about the GIF format.
Global CSS files: Global CSS files are separate CSS files that are referenced by and apply to all of the pages on a Web site. Often global CSS files will include colour font and layout information that apply throughout a Web site.
HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language: HTML is a mark-up language for hypertext documents on the Web. HTML and XHTML allow an author to label each element in a document, so that they can be interpreted by a Web browser or other user agents and appropriately displayed on a device. HTML documents are SGML documents.
Hosting: Web hosts offer their clients diskpace on a Web server for a Web site; this space can be accessed through the World Wide Web. See ISP.
Internationalization: Internationalization (often abbreviated to i18n) is the effort to make the Web usable to everyone regardless of their preferred language or geographic location through the effort of making all technologies operable across all languages and writing systems.
ISP (Internet Service Provider or Service Provider): ISPs offer their clients access to and a presence on the Internet. See Hosting
Mark-up Language: A mark-up language is a language that "marks-up" the text of a document by putting tags around content to describe what that content is and how to display it.
Pixel-perfect Design: A term used to describe a Web page design that does not allow for flexibility such as different monitor and window sizes, font sizes or other differences in user agents.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics): PNG is an unpatented graphic file format that was developed in the mid-90s in response to patent problems with the GIF format. PNG has additional features including: alpha transparency, gamma correction, faster interlacing, slightly better lossless compression and more. Some browsers do not support the PNG file format.
Presentation: Presentation is the look of a Web site, consisting of the layout, fonts, colours, images that are just used for decoration and other elements. Web page presentation can be entirely controlled by the CSS. Presentation, within the context of Web standards discussion, is often used in contrast to content.
RDF (Resource Description Framework): RDF is a language for describing relationships between resources using specific vocabularies ("ontologies") so that knowledge models we have in the real world can be better correlated for information re-use.
RSS ("Really Simple Syndication", "RDF Site Summary" or "Rich Site Summary"): RSS is a popular, but contentious format for syndicating news and Web site updates. All RSS standards which are currently in use are XML, and of these, RSS 1.0 is also RDF.
Screen Readers: A screen reader is a software program that reads the text on a computer screen aloud to a user. Screen readers are often used by blind or visually impaired people.
Semantic structure: Semantic structure means organization that has meaning. For example, a Web page that is structured semantically must have mark-up that accurately reflects and extends the meaning of the content.
SGML: SGML is a system for defining markup languages. Each markup language defined in SGML is called an SGML application. HTML is an example of an SGML application.
SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics): These are multimedia and graphics-related standards; the latter is well-supported by Adobe and has advantages over the Macromedia Flash format because it is an XML language. Using SVG animation in combination with the DOM has results which are equivalent to Flash, but with a result that is accessible and better semantically structured.
Specification (often shortened to Spec): A specification is a detailed description of design criteria for a piece of work. However, within the context of Web standards, we mean the specifications as put forward by standards bodies that tell us exactly the way HTML, XHTML, CSS and other languages should be composed, how browsers should behave, how the documents should be served, as well as other directives.
User Agent: A user agent is a piece of software that interprets Web documents for a user. Examples of user agents are browsers on PCs, cell phones or PDAs, and screen readers.
Web Authors: Web authors create documents for the Web using a mark-up language or software that generates a mark-up language. Web authors can be Web designers or Web developers.
XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language): XHTML is a reformulation of HTML so that it conforms to the rules of XML. This means that XHTML is very similar to HTML, except for slight differences in the markup, but it is now an application of XML.
XML (eXtensible Markup Language): XML is a very flexible mark-up language that allows the author to define his own set of elements, and the rules for these elements. So, an author could decide to mark-up a recipe with tags like <ingredient>, <step>, <oventemperature>, and specify that all these elements must appear inside a <recipe> tag. There exists formal sets of XML documents, of which one is XHTML.
XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language): XSL is a family of recommendations which describes how XML documents should display and facilitates the transformation of XML documents into other formats.