Glossary of the Internet

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Bandwidth

The speed that information can travel, measured in kilobits per second (kbps). Some servers will have better bandwidth than others, allowing quicker access and more users at a time. Large files consume lots of bandwidth as they download. Think of it as a pipe — only a certain amount of information can fit through at a time.

Browser

The program you use to view webpages. You’re more than likely reading this through one right now. They translate, or interpret HTML code into the page you see. The most common are Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), and Netscape Navigator (NN). There are also text-only browsers, used for speedy information gathering.

CSS — Cascading Style Sheets

Stylesheets are the hottest thing in web design since they were introduced a few years back. They give you huge control over your design, and with a few small changes, you could change the look of your whole site. Only more recent browsers support them, but now about 90% of web users can see them, so you should use them in your site. To find out how, read our stylesheets section.

HTML — HyperText Mark-up Language

HTML is the language you’re here to learn. Get the full picture in What is HTML?. “HyperText” is the way you surf the net — by clicking on links to travel between pages, and therefore travelling to sites that are located elsewhere in the world at a click of a mouse. This text is called hyper, because presumably, it’s text that has gone quite mad. “Markup” denotes the way you format documents, by marking up tags around the text; and “language”, because HTML coders like to boast at parties that they are “very multilingual”. Or something.

by ClickFire Admin 09.15.2008