Introducing the World Wide Web


Glossary
- browser
- a World Wide Web client--that is, a software package that lets you to look around the World Wide Web
- CERN
- particle physics institute located in Geneva, Switzerland and originators of the World Wide Web
- client
- a computer running client software that connects to server machines running server software; the client makes requests to a server for documents and is responsible for displaying the information. NCSA Mosaic is an example of client software.
- document
- unit of information sent from servers to clients; a document may contain plain or formatted text, inlined graphics, sound, other multimedia data, or hyperlinks to other documents; often also referred to as a file
- external viewer
- a software program that a client calls upon to view file formats it does not support internally
- HTML
- HyperText Markup Language, the collection of styles used to define the various components of a hypertext document
- HTTP
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the protocol used by Web servers
- hyperlink
- a word or graphic in a document with some form of highlighting that links to another document; also called an anchor
- hypermedia
- online information with text, images, audio, and animation associated in a nonlinear web of associations
- inlined image
- a graphic image that is displayed along with text in a document window
- Internet
- an international computer network connecting universities, research institutions, government agencies, and businesses
- NCSA Mosaic
- Web client developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; available on X Window System, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows platforms
- server
- a computer running server software that provides information upon request to computers running client software
- SGML
- Standard Generalized Markup Language, a language that defines the structure of a document and the logical relationship of its parts
- tags
- formatting codes used in HTML (e.g., <H1> </H1>, <P>)
- UIUC
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- URL
- Uniform Resource Locator, server and path information used in an HTML-coded source file to locate another document
- World Wide Web
- a distributed hypertext-based information system developed at CERN; also called the Web, WWW, or W3


mosaic@ncsa.uiuc.edu