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Internet Terminology

Web sites! It seems that everyone is talking about them. Many businesses as well as individuals have them. And thousands more are wondering whether they should have one. You can drive down the streets and see one sign after another telling you to put your computer to work so that you can supplement your income by hundreds or thousands of dollars each year. You inquire about these opportunities and find that many of them require you to have a web site. You also wonder whether or not these are legitimate opportunities or scams. Use your favorite search engine and look up "Internet Fraud." The statistics from the year 2000 are interesting. They can be found at <http://www.fraud.org>.

Perhaps words such as browser, world wide web, internet, search engines and directories make your mind spin. As you begin to ask questions to try to educate yourself, you run into more new words such as server, ISP, domain, URL, HTML, XML, meta tags, java script, JPEG and GIF to mention only a few of the words that were not in your spelling books back in the "good old days!" Soon you begin to wonder whether you still live in an English speaking country or whether you have been picked up by a UFO and carried away to some far-off planet governed by teenagers and technology gurus! Your worst nightmare is that you will spend the rest of your life trying to learn to talk and listen in acronyms while learning a completely new language--the universal language of the World Wide Web.

Truly the growth of the World Wide Web and the lowering costs of computers are changing our world in many ways. Over the next few months we want to de-mystify some of the "mysteries" of the internet and show our users how to use a few of the programs available to anyone who wants to gain greater value from their computer. First of all let's start with a few definitions.

What is a server? It is simply a computer with a large hard drive.

What is the internet? It is the global network that connects millions of computers world-wide. The backbone of the internet at this writing is MCI with its millions of miles of fiber optics and its satellite connections.

What is the World Wide Web indicated in web site addresses by the letters www? Quite simply, it is a system of internet servers on which specially formatted documents reside.

What do you mean by specially formatted documents? I mean documents that are written in a format that can be understood by anyone who looks at a web site. These documents are usually written in HTML (hypertext mark-up language). In the future many business sites will be written in XML (extensible mark-up language) because it allows directions to be given to the user more specifically, thus allowing documents to be exchanged between companies doing different types of business. The graphics included in the documents must be in JPEG or GIF formats.

What is an ISP? It is simply an internet service provider. It might be a national provider such as Compuserve, AOL and AT&T or a local provider such as EZNets, Inc; SSSnet, Inc; or Speedy Net. Or it might be a free service provider such as Blue Light or Juno. A computer must have a service provider in order to reach the internet. Every web site must reside on the hard drive of a server somewhere. That server is called the host. In order to find the web site, you must know the address of the server on which the site resides. This address is called a URL (universal resource locator). For example, the address to CAMUG is www.neo.rr.com/CAMUG. The CAMUG site rests on a server on the World Wide Web, NorthEast Ohio, RoadRunner, COMmercial. The upper case letters give meaning to the address. You will also notice an http in front of the www. This simply refers to the method (protocol) by which the site is transferred to your computer.

Now we are ready to define the rest of the terms mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this article. Meta tags are always in the background. You do not see them when you look at a web site. They are used to describe a site by title, keywords and content. Search engines look for them. Java Script allows activity on a site such as waving flags, pictures that change on a given schedule or text that appears and disappears depending on the movement or click of your mouse.

What is a search engine? Think of it as a librarian. You tell it what information you want to find and it searches for meta tags containing the words you asked it to find. Examples of search engines include Alta Vista, Dogpile, Northern Light and MSN?

What is a directory? A directory lists sites alphabetically based on the title (in meta tags) of the site. Perhaps the best known directory is Yahoo.