Introduction to HTML Glossary

This glossary is specifically limited to terms covered in the tutorial. If you are looking for a long, comprehensive list of term and definitions, you should consult the Beginner's Web Glossary.

Anchor

See Hyperlink.

Browser

A program used to load, view, and interact with Web documents. The most famous examples of browsers are NCSA Mosaic and Netscape.

Browser window

The part of the browser's display where the contents of a document are displayed; in graphical browsers, the window can be scrolled back and forth through a document. The text you're reading at this moment is in the browser window.

Content

The actual 'meat' of a document -- all of the words, images, and links which a user can read and interact with. I use this term a lot to mean "whatever you put in the document."

GIF file

A graphic file of a specific format: the Graphic Interchange Format. This format was developed by Compuserve and has become an Internet standard for exchanging files across multiple platforms. All graphical Web browsers will load and place valid GIF files.

Go list

See History List.

History list

The list of the documents you've visited during your current Web session. This may be implemented differently by different browsers, but the idea is to let you quickly jump back to a document you read earlier.

Hyperlink

A link from one document to another, or to any resource, or within a document. The hyperlinked text is highlighted in some fashion. The default is usually blue, underlined text, but your display may vary.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

The basis of the World Wide Web, and what the tutorial is intended to teach. HTML is a Document Type Definition (DTD), or subset, of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

In-line

Almost always used in the context "in-line image," this refers to a resource of some type which is placed directly into a document. As I say, this is nearly always an image, but the future could see things like in-line animations.

Netscape extensions

HTML-type tags which are recognized by Netscape and were invented by the authors of that program. Some of these tags are becoming standard, while others are not. See Appendix B.

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)

An open document definition language much in use in the publishing industry. HTML is a definition under SGML.

Text editor

Any program which will do even the most basic word processing and will save files to standard ASCII text. Check your program's manual if you are unsure of how this would be done, as different programs will do things differently.

URL

The Uniform Resource Locator is a "standard" way of easily expressing the location and data type of a resource. The general form of a URL is "protocol://address" (for example, "gopher://gopher.cwru.edu/"). You can read more about it at NCSA.

Web browser

See Browser.

Whitespace

Line feeds, carriage returns, spaces, and anything else which is definable content but not a visible character.

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