TGM Designs

TGM Designs created this glossary of web design and related terminology to help our clients to know and understand what services we provide. The terms cited are used regularly throughout Web development and design documentation. If you are starting a new website project then you will find these terms very helpful. This glossary's intention is to be relevant and beneficial to your understanding rather than be comprehensive.

ABSOLUTE LINK

A link showing the entire URL versus the short URL that a relative link uses. An absolute link can be placed anywhere on on any webpage and will always point to the same place whereas a relative link will not. (Example: http://www.tgmdesigns.com/clients.php)

ACCESS LOG

A list of requests that users have requested from a website. These are generally used when generating statistics. Access logs can record things such as long long a user was on a specfic page, their IP address, etc.

ACTIVEX

Created by Microsoft, these are controls that can be downloaded from the Internet to perform a variety of different fucntions. These are "activated" by a web browser when viewing a webpage. An example of one of these "controls" is animation.

AD SLOT

Adapted from the traditional print media, it refers to a assigned space on the webpage reserved for a button/banner advertisement.

ADDRESS

Another name for a web address or URL.

AGENT

Similiar to a "bot", an agent is a program that are given well defined but small tasks to complete then report back.

AJAX

Acronym for Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX). AJAX is used to utilize the abilities of Javascript and XML to create interactivity on a webpage.

ALIGNMENT

This refers to the position of text, an image, a Table, or DIV tag on a web page. Most commmonly used are left, right and center.

ALT TEXT

Alt text is a short sentence or paragraph used to describe the image.

AMAYA

An open source web browser editor from W3C. Visit the Amaya website for more information.

Analytics

In Internet Terms; The study of user activity on a web site or web application to understand how well it fulfils its objectives.

ANIMATED GIF

An animated GIF is a GIF graphic file that contains two or more images or "frames" in a sequence to appear as if it's moving.

ANONYMOUS FTP

A method for downloading files from an FTP server without using an authorized account.

APACHE

An open source web server that is mostly used for Unix, Linux and Solaris platforms.

APPLET

A Java application or program designed to be embedded in a HTML page to run with another program.

ARCHIVE

Containing a number of other files, an archive is a file whos sole purpose is to back up or compress for storage purposes.

ASCII

Acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII).

ASP

Acronym for Active Server Pages. A specification that enables Web pages to be dynamically created using HTML, scripts, and reusable ActiveX server components.

ASP.net

A set of web application development technologies marketed by Microsoft. Programmers can use it to build dynamic web sites, web applications and XML web services. It is part of Microsoft's .NET platform and is the successor to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology.

ATOM

A XML based file produces a lists posts of a blog that can be read by different news reader software. The "feed" can contain anything inside the post such as the title, it's body text, links, and other post related information.

AUTO RESPONDER

An auto responder is a type of e-mail that automatically replies with any type of specfic message once someone has sent e-mail to it. Most commonly used to let the sender know that the message has been recieved.