Web glossary
Following is a list of terms used in this guide. For web glossaries with a wider range of terms go to Web resources.
Accessibility
The University of South Australia is committed to ensuring access to
online materials for people with disabilities, and aims to comply with
the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 at the
Priority 1 level. Click on the link
Web
accessibility in the footer on any UniSA webpage for more details. The
W3C guidelines are referred to throughout this guide.
Browser
A software application that allows for the browsing of the world wide
web. This application interprets and arranges (based on coded
programming instructions, such as HTML) all the hypermedia elements
(text, sound, images) contained on a webpage. Commonly used browsers are
Netscape and Internet Explorer. Different browsers can have radically
different capabilities and limitations. Some sites try to support almost
all existing browsers, while others try to support only the newest and
most popular browsers. A middle-ground approach is to have some enhanced
features for newer browsers, yet provide graceful degradation for older
browsers. Browser functionality is a consideration if you are using
enhanced features such as video and audio. For more details see
Web browsers.
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) save a lot of time in terms of editing and
allow you to do more than HTML does. With normal HTML every headline
needs coded attributes such as font and size applied to it. With style
sheets, however, we simply say 'All headlines will appear in this font,
at this size'. And we only say it once. They are cascading because one
set of 'styles' can override another set of 'styles' ie more than one
style sheet can affect the same page. You can have externally
linked styles, page-level styles and in-line styles forming a hierarchy.
Your browser - if it can display styles - looks for in-line first, then
page-level, then linked.
Example: If you are using a style sheet on the actual document, called ('in-line'), and a style sheet that is being referenced by multiple pages (called a 'span'), both can have an effect on the items in the page. If both the in-line and the span style sheet are attempting to affect the same item, eg an <H1> command, the closest to the <H1> command wins. That would be the in-line in this case.
Devweb
UniSA's corporate web development server (test server).
Directory
The directory consists of your website's folders and files (ie the
structure behind the webpages the user views). The main folder is the
directory, and the folders within it (eg images) are the subdirectories.
These folders will contain the files that are your webpages.
Domain name (web)
Location of an entity on the Internet. There are different levels of
domains. Top level domain examples are .com, .net, .edu.
Information architecture (IA)
IA views web content as building blocks to be fitted into a site's
visual design and navigation scheme. It involves the design of
organisation, labelling, navigation, and searching systems to help
people find and manage information more successfully. It is 'the art and
science of structuring and classifying web sites and intranets to help
people find and manage information' (Information Architecture for the
World Wide Web, 2nd Edition, Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville).
Intranet
A private internal network within an organisation, company etc which may
consist of many interlinked local area networks. Its main purpose is to
share files, utilise websites, and collaborate among employees. Usually
it cannot be accessed from the Internet.
Meta tags
The meta element in HTML can be used to identify properties of a
document (eg author, description, a list of key words) and assign values
to those properties. Meta tags offer search engines information about
your webpage, and some search engines display this information in their
listings. There are various meta tag elements out there, from the author
content, to copyright information, to revisit tags. But the ones that
really count are your meta description tag and your meta keyword tag.
Metadata
The information that is contained within the meta tags of a web site.
Navigation
Navigation on your site facilitates movement from one web page to another web page.
Prodweb
UniSA's corporate web production (live) server name.
Server
A web server
serves webpages to clients across the Internet or an Intranet. The web
server hosts the pages, scripts, programs, and multimedia files and
serves them using HTTP, a protocol designed to send files to web
browsers and other protocols.
Server Side Includes (SSI)
SSI allow you to write some commonly used code once and
have the server insert it into the pages for you. In other words an
include file has code that you would like to reuse. Any ASP or SHTML
page that wants to use the code in the include file will have a special
line that indicates the place holder for the code. This code looks like:
<!--#include virtual="/path" -->. This results in the server taking the entire content of the file and
inserts it into the page, replacing the line.
Subweb
This is a feature particular to FrontPage. If you have a group working
on a web site, or you want to have several sites with different styles
on one web domain (or account), FrontPage allows you to create a web
inside of another web, and a web inside of a web inside of a web. Each 'subweb'
also has its own set of permissions, its own username and password, and
its own shared borders and configuration files.
Template
A web template standardises and constrains the common elements of a
webpage. These elements are peripheral to the focus of the page and are
additional to the actual content. Examples of these elements are certain
navigation conventions, corporate identity and administrative details
such as the generic email contact (footer).
Testweb
UniSA's old authoring test server name.
URL
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. The URL is the address of a
resource, or file, available on the Internet. The URL contains the
protocol of the resource (e.g. http:// or ftp://), the domain name for
the resource, and the hierarchical name for the file (address). For
example, a page on the internet may be at the URL http://www.unisa.edu.au/intro/default.asp.
The beginning part, http:// provides the protocol, the next part
www.unisa.edu.au is the domain, the main domain is unisa.edu.au, while
www is a pointer to a computer or a resource. The rest, /intro/default.asp,
is the pointer to the specific file on that server.