Glossary

Bandwidth
How much stuff you can send through a connection. Usually measured in bits-per-second. A full page of English text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 15,000 bits in one second. Full-motion full-screen video would require roughly 10,000,000 bits-per-second, depending on compression.

Banners
Banners are the basic unit of advertising on the Web. They were pioneered by GNN and HotWired back in the frontier days of 1994 and are now nearly ubiquitous, appearing in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and locations.

Bit
(Binary DigIT) -- A single digit number in base-2, in other words, either a 1 or a zero. The smallest unit of computerized data. Bandwidth is usually measured in bits-per-second.

Bit-map
A bitmap is a mapped array of pixels that can be saved as a file. Both JPEG and GIF are bitmap graphic formats. Currently, the only other way to store an image is as a vector graphic. You can't easily scale bitmap images, but you can control every single pixel and thus achieve many effects impossible in vector graphics. Conversely, vector formats offer advantages of scalability and lower bandwidth requirements. When you compress a bitmapped image, you suck out some of the visual information. To bypass this, the portable network graphics format (or PNG, pronounced "ping") was designed to store a single bitmap image for transmittal over computer networks without losing this data.

Browser
A Client program (software) that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.

Duotone
Duotones are images that only display in two colors. Like most visual techniques on the Web, duotones come from the world of print. In print, the more colors you use, the slower the production time and the higher the cost, so duotones were often an economical alternative. Duotones can also improve efficiency on the Web by enabling the creation of cool-looking images with small file sizes. Duotones are made by first creating a grayscale image and then overlaying it with a different specified color.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
FAQs are documents that list and answer the most common questions on a particular subject. There are hundreds of FAQs on subjects as diverse as Pet Grooming and Cryptography. FAQs are usually written by people who have tired of answering the same question over and over.

Fill
To fill an image means to paint the inside of it with a selected color or pattern. The fill can be used to create shading and other simple effects. In HTML, a popular technique is to fill tables with colors, especially in long lists of information. For example, if you are making a Web page showing the 50 top-grossing movies of the year, it will be easier to read if you fill the rows of the table and alternate the background colors.

Flatten
Many image-processing programs, like Photoshop, allow you to build images in layers. These layers are created one at a time and placed on top of each other to assemble the whole image. While the file is a pile of little layered images, you can manipulate each layer individually and look at how each change will alter the completed picture. In order to move the file to another program or save it as a GIF or JPEG, however, you must flatten all these layers into one file.

Font
A font is the overall design for a set of characters. It describes the size, weight, and spacing of a character and shouldn't be confused with a typeface, which is a more general term. Courier is a typeface; Courier 24-point bold is a font. Computers display fonts in either a bitmap or a vector format. In a bitmapped font, each character is represented by an arrangement of dots. In a vector font system, the shape or outline of each character is defined geometrically. Since a vector font is scalable according to the defined outline, a vector system can make many differently sized fonts from one defined set of characters. Currently, the most widely used vector font systems are PostScript and TrueType.

FTP
(File Transfer Protocol) -- A very common method of moving files between two Internet sites. FTP is a special way to login to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. There are many Internet sites that have established publicly accessible repositories of material that can be obtained using FTP, by logging in using the account name anonymous, thus these sites are called anonymous ftp servers.

GIF
(Graphic Interchange Format) -- A common format for image files, especially suitable for images containing large areas of the same color. GIF format files of simple images are often smaller than the same file would be if stored in JPEG format, but GIF format does not store photographic images as well as JPEG.

Hexadecimal
The hexadecimal (base 16) number system used for Web-page design consists of 16 unique symbols: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, and F. For example, the decimal number 15 is equal to the hexadecimal number F. In HTML, an RGB color can be designated by RRGGBB with the first two numerals representing the amount of red, the second two the amount of green, and the last two the amount of blue. If you wanted your background to be red, you could write the code for a body background color as <body bgcolor="#FF0000">. Black is the absence of all color and white is the presence of all color, so in hexadecimal, black is at the bottom of the system (no red, green, or blue: #000000) and white is at the top (the maximum amount of red, green, and blue: #FFFFFF).

Home Page (or Homepage)
Several meanings. Originally, the web page that your browser is set to use when it starts up. The more common meaning refers to the main web page for a business, organization, person or simply the main page out of a collection of web pages, e.g. "Check out so-and-so's new Home Page." Another sloppier use of the term refers to practically any web page as a "homepage," e.g. "That web site has 65 homepages and none of them are interesting."

HTML
(HyperText Markup Language) -- The coding language used to create Hypertext documents for use on the World Wide Web. HTML looks a lot like old-fashioned typesetting code, where you surround a block of text with codes that indicate how it should appear, additionally, in HTML you can specify that a block of text, or a word, is linked to another file on the Internet. HTML files are meant to be viewed using a World Wide Web Client Program, such as Netscape or Mosaic.

Internet (Upper case I)
The vast collection of inter-connected networks that all use the TCP/IP protocols and that evolved from the ARPANET of the late 60's and early 70's. The Internet now (July 1995) connects roughly 60,000 independent networks into a vast global internet.

Intranet
A private network inside a company or organization that uses the same kinds of software that you would find on the public Internet, but that is only for internal use. As the Internet has become more popular many of the tools used on the Internet are being used in private networks, for example, many companies have web servers that are available only to employees. Note that an Intranet may not actually be an internet -- it may simply be a network.

Link
A link is a bit of highlighted text on a Web page that connects to another Web page or file. Clicking the link sends your browser in search of the address attached to the text. That address can refer to another place on the same page, another page within the same site, or just about anywhere on the Internet.

Liquid Site
A site designed to so that it adjusts to accommodate the size of the browser window.

JPEG
(Joint Photographic Experts Group) -- JPEG is most commonly mentioned as a format for image files. JPEG format is preferred to the GIF format for photographic images as opposed to line art or simple logo art.

Negative Space
Negative space is space in the web page that is unused. There are no subjects in that area. A well designed site needs negative space to keep the picture from being too busy and distracting.

Network
Any time you connect 2 or more computers together so that they can share resources, you have a computer network. Connect 2 or more networks together and you have an internet.

Pixel
The cell is nature's building block, and the pixel is the Web designer's. Pixel is one of those half-baked half-acronyms: PICture ELement. It refers to how monitors divide the display screen into thousands or millions of individual dots. A pixel is one of those dots. An 8-bit color monitor can display 256 pixels, while a 24-bit color monitor can display more than 16 million. If you design a Web graphic on a 24-bit monitor, there's an excellent chance that many of your 16 million pixels won't be seen by visitors to your site. Since the agreed-upon lowest common denominator palette for the Web has 216 colors, you should design your graphics using 8-bit color.

Plug-in
A (usually small) piece of software that adds features to a larger piece of software. Common examples are plug-ins for the Netscape® browser and web server. Adobe Photoshop® also uses plug-ins.

The idea behind plug-in's is that a small piece of software is loaded into memory by the larger program, adding a new feature, and that users need only install the few plug-ins that they need, out of a much larger pool of possibilities. Plug-ins are usually created by people other than the publishers of the software the plug-in works with.

Raw File
Files that are saved in the same format as the file that was used to create them, not as JPEGs or GIFs. These files allow users (with the proper software) to open the files and edit them. Examples of these files often end with the extension .png (Fireworks), .psd (Photoshop), .fla (Flash), .ai (Illustrator).

Resolution
The resolution of an image describes how fine the dots are that make up that image. The more dots, the higher the resolution. A 300 dpi (dots per inch) printer is capable of printing 300 dots in a line 1 inch long. This means it can print 90,000 dots per square inch. When displayed on a monitor, the dots are called pixels. A 640-by-480-pixel screen is capable of displaying 640 distinct dots on each of its 480 lines, or about 300,000 pixels.

Rollovers
Rollover is a widely used dHTML effect, its name originally coming from Macromedia Director's scripting language, Lingo. Internet Explorer 4.0 first supported rollover effects through Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) without requiring extra code. The dHTML mouseover works by switching the visibility of a CSS layer from hidden to visible and back again. This kind of rollover allows you to swap in text or plug-ins, as well as alternate back and forth between images to create the effect.

Vector
Vector graphics produce images using mathematically generated points, lines and shapes that are rendered on a computer. The result is a file much smaller than a bitmap, which is easier to send and download over tight bandwidth connections. In addition, a vector file can be resized and manipulated without distorting the image. Macromedia's Flash produces vector graphics, and most browsers now support vector graphics.

Web-safe colors
Colors that are consistent on all platforms across the web. Read more here.