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Web Terminology
- Above the line
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Above the Line is the term commonly used for advertising for which a payment is made and for which commission is paid to an external party. Methods of above the line advertising include television and radio, magazines, newspapers and Internet.
- Actionscript
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ActionScript is the scripting language used by Macromedia Flash. It makes your Flash content interactive. ActionScript provides a more efficient way to do things in Flash, from creating simple animations through designing complex, data-rich, interactive application interfaces. As the scripting language for Macromedia Flash, ActionScript has evolved incrementally over many releases. There are two versions of ActionScript: ActionScript 1.0 and ActionScript 2.0.
- Accessability
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The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.
* Visually impaired people using screen readers
* Hearing impaired people using browsers with no sound
* Physically impaired people
* Color blind people
This is now, more than ever, very important in defining web standards. - AFM
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Definition: Adobe Font Metrics
A text file that stores font metrics information such as character widths and kerning pairs. This file is often not needed as long as there is a PFM file (Windows format), so some fonts may come without an AFM file.
- Agile (Scrum Methodology)
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Scrum is characterized by: • A living backlog of prioritized work to be done.
• Completion of a largely fixed set of backlog items in a series of short iterations or sprints.
• A brief daily meeting (called a scrum), at which progress is explained, upcoming work is described, and obstacles are raised.
• A brief planning session in which the backlog items for the sprint will be defined.
• A brief heartbeat retrospective, at which all team members reflect about the past sprint.
- AJAX
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Definition: Asynchronous JavaScript And XML
Ajax is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.
- Alignment
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Alignment is for the use of properly position text within a body of a website. Alignment attributes vary from Top to Bottom, from Right to Left and Center. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the preferred web standard of properly aligning content.
- Alley
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Typography - The space between two columns of set type; sometimes also called a column gutter or column margin.
- Alt tag
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The alternative text that the browser displays when the surfer does not want to or cannot see the pictures present in a web page. Using alt tags containing keywords can improve the search engine ranking of the page for those keywords.
- Anchor
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In web terms, a hyperlink is a reference (an address) to a resource on the web. Hyperlinks can point to any resource on the web: an HTML page, an image, a sound file, a movie, etc. An anchor is a term used to define a hyperlink destination inside a document. The HTML anchor element < a >, is used to define both hyperlinks and anchors. We will use the term HTML link when the < a > element points to a resource, and the term HTML anchor when the < a > elements defines an address inside a document.
- Anonymous FTP
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A means of using FTP to make files readily available to the public. If you start an FTP session with a remote host, you give the log in or user name anonymous and enter your email address as a password. When you use a URL starting with "ftp://" and a domain name with a Web browser, an anonymous FTP session begins, and you don't have to enter a user name or password.
- ANSI (all caps)
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A general standards organization in the United States that facilitates the voluntary establishment of standards for many areas, including computing. The staff at ANSI don't create standards; they coordinate with organizations in the US to provide a neutral forum for the development of standards.
Among the standards on which ANSI has worked is a set of cross-platform printer control codes. Pine, for example, sends print commands to your local computer in this form when you configure Pine to use the "attached-to-ansi" printing method. This allows you to print email messages on a printer attached to your local computer even if it is not directly connected to the network. The tricky part is that your communications program must be able to understand the ANSI print codes that Pine sends. Because these ANSI print commands are part of an accepted standard, many communications programs know what to do with them, but many do not. - Anti-Pattern
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Antipatterns are approaches to common problems that might appear obvious, but are less than optimal in practice.
When moving an organization toward good user experience practice, providing a documented—possibly extreme—example of bad practice as an antipattern can help raise awareness of what can go wrong and why we must avoid such bad practice. To effectively communicate a problem that we need to solve to an entire organization, we can write an antipattern in everyday, accessible language. In addition to sharing our understanding of a problem with a client, an antipattern also helps a UX team describe a solution for the problem. An antipattern lets a UX team present a solution in context, which helps people who aren’t UX specialists understand the pitfalls that are associated with a particular practice - Apex
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Typography - Where strokes come together at the uppermost point of a character; examples of different types: rounded, pointed, hollow, flat, and extended.
- API
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Definition: Application Programming Interface
Application Programming Interface. The interface (calling conventions) by which an application program accesses operating system and other services. An API is defined at source code level and provides a level of abstraction between the application and the kernel (or other privileged utilities) to ensure the portability of the code.
- Applet
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A small program written in Java and included in a HTML page. It is independent of the operating system on which it runs. An applet can be used to display scrolling text in a specific area, or animations.
- ASCII (all caps)
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Definition: American Standard Code for Information Interchange
It is a widely used standard for encoding text documents on computers. Usually when the term "ASCII" is used, it is describing a text document. If a file is described as ASCII text, this means you can view the contents of the file, change it with an editor, or print it with a printer. It does not contain any special embedded control characters. In ASCII, every letter, number, and punctuation symbol has a corresponding number, or ASCII code. For example, the character for the number 1 has the code 49, capital letter A has the code 65, and a blank space has the code 32. This encoding system not only lets a computer store a document as a series of numbers, but also lets it share such documents with other computers that use the ASCII system. For a complete list of ASCII codes, see the Knowledge Base document A table of ASCII character codes.
- ASP (all caps)
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Definition: Active Server Pages
A server-side scripting technology developed by Microsoft that supplies dynamic and interactive functionality to web pages. ASP allows you to embed controls from different languages into a single page. ASP offers native support for Visual Basic (VB) scripts and JScript (Microsoft's implementation of JavaScript). ASP offers itself as a desirable alternative to PHP or CGI scripts when hosted in a Windows server environment.
- ATM (all caps)
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Definition: Adobe Type Manager
Adobe Type Manager is a font utility published by Adobe that allows your computer to use PostScript fonts. There are two versions of ATM, Lite (regular) and Deluxe. Both versions rasterize the PostScript fonts so that you can view and print them, but the Deluxe version acts as a font management utility so you can organize your fonts for easy use.
- Attribute
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HTML attribute, ie: `align=center' - align is the attribute.
- Authentication
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In web terms: the method used to verify the identity of a user, program or computer on the web.
- Augmented reality
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Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery - creating a mixed reality. The augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, such as sports scores on TV during a match. With the help of advanced AR technology (e.g. adding computer vision and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and digitally usable. Artificial information about the environment and the objects in it can be stored and retrieved as an information layer on top of the real world view. The term augmented reality is believed to have been coined in 1990 by Thomas Caudell, an employee of Boeing at the time[1]. Augmented reality research explores the application of computer-generated imagery in live-video streams as a way to expand the real-world. Advanced research includes use of head-mounted displays and virtual retinal displays for visualization purposes, and construction of controlled environments containing any number of sensors and actuators.
