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.

FEATHERING

In raster graphics, feathering means to blur the edges of a graphic slowly to give a blurry edge.

FEED

In reference to an RSS feed, a feed is an XML based table of contents of updates from a blog or news website. These feeds are read by feed readers and allows a user to read updates on their favorite sites without having to go to them.

FIREWALL

A piece of security equiptment on a network that connects the Internet and the user's network together while blocking certain data from being transfered between the two.

FISK

To take every piece of information in an article or document and examine it.

FLASH

Vector grapic animation based software from Macromedia (Now Adobe) that allows certain types of graphics to look the same across all browsers. Flash requires a plug-in to be viewd in a browser.

FLOAT

A variable of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that allows the defined element to be outside of the document flow but still affect the layout of the content. For example, you can float an image to the left of a pargaph tag to give the appearance of the text wrapping around it.

FOOTER

The bottom half of a document, webpage, graphics, e-mails or messages.

FONT

A complete set of alphanumerical characters, in a certain size, shape and format. Most include letters, numbers and symbols. Times New Roman, Verdana, Georgia and Tahoma all examples of fonts.

FORMMAIL

Formmail and its many variants, is a free open source web server CGI script that captures and processes form contents and then typically e-mails them to one or more recipients. The script, originally created in Perl is available today in many web programming languages.

FORMS

A way for visitors of a website to communicate with the webmaster instead of through e-mail. Forms generally ask for specific things such as name, address, e-mail address and allow you to comment or ask questions. You can see an example of a form on our Contact Us page.

FORUM

A web term for a news group.

FORUM BOARD

An online discussion or newsgroup where users of similar interest can exchange open messages. Our Supoort Forums is an example of a forum board.

FRAME

An instance of an animation such as that in a Flash animation or animated GIF file. It is also a single but seperate scrollable or non-scrollable area of a webpage of multiple Frames.

FRAMES

An HTML feature that allows the user to view a webpage that is divided into two or more sepearte scrollable or non-scrollable areas.

FREEWARE

Computer programs that are available for download from the web for free. More often than not these programs are often only trial or stripped down verisions of the real program to get the user to want to buy the full program.

FRONT DOOR

The first page or homepage of a website.

FRONTPAGE

A WYSIWYG webpage editor created by Microsoft.

FTP

Acronym for File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This is a method of uploading or downloading files between a domain and a computer without using a third party file manager.

FUNCTION

Functions are blocks of code in programming that can be defined once and invoked from other parts of a program. Functions are usually well defined with small tasks. Using a function allows the programmer to not rewrite code repeatedly. Functions are more commonly used in PHP and termed as "includes".