Online Glossary

Bandwidth

Capacity of the circuit measured in frequency for analog circuits and in bits per second (bps) on digital circuits.

Browser

A type of client software that is used to read Hypertext documents. Many also have E-mail and News capability built in to them. You are probably viewing this page with a browser.

Cable Modem

Direct, constant internet connection through the cable company that is similar to a network connection. Does not require a modem, and instead uses a network router box.

Client

A client program (software) that is one half of a client/server pair. The client resides at the users computer while the server is on the network. The client interprets the users request and sends it to the server for fulfillment. A "Web Browser" is a Client.

Domain Name

The unique name that identifies an Internet site. Domain Names have multiple segments separated by periods. The "technical" term for these periods is "dot." The left most segment refers to specific machines, while the rightmost portion refers to the network hierarchy to which the machine belongs. For example:
www.netpaths.net
mail.netpaths.net


See TLD

DSL

Digital Subscriber Line high speed internet connection through the phone company that runs on existing phone lines, and allows multiple use of a single telephone line.

Firewall

Security partition between your computer and the internet that guards against virus and malicious attacks. Available as software progam or dedicated hardware running monitoring software 24 hours a day.

Google Dance

The monthly recalculation of the pagerank of all the pages in Google's index. It occurs approximately once a month and usually takes about one week to complete. During a dance websites shuffle rankings, and you can generally see a preview of the rankings at www2.google.com and www3.google.com. When a dance is not occurring, the search results at www, www2, and www3 are identical.

Host

Any computer on a network that provides services to other computers: server. Hosts provide services such as WWW and E-mail.

HTTP

(HyperText Transport Protocol) -- The protocol for moving data across the Internet. Requires a HTTP browser on the user end, and an HTTP servers program on the host end. HTTP is the most important protocol used in the World Wide Web (WWW).

Hyperlink

Reference to another webpage or site, either as a clickable image or text, a link to another page or file.

Hypertext

Generally, any text on a website. Words or phrases in a document displayed in a browser.