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.

GATEWAY

	A machine or software that connects two networks at the same time to act as a transfer point between two dissimlar protocols.
	A business or software that enables e-commerce systems to communicate with a merchant's Merchant Account Provider to enable online credit card processing.

GB

Acronym for Gigabyte (GB). Approximately 1,024 Megabytes.

GIF

Acronym for Graphic Interchange Format (GIF). GIF is a file format for images mainly used on the Internet in the form of pictures or graphics. GIF images are simple and smaller than of their JPEG counterpart which offers better image quality.

GLYPH

A character in a font.

GNU

GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix," and refers generally to software distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL).

GPL

Acronym for GNU Public Licence - A licence applied to a program to specify it can be distributed and modified to/by anyone, but if a modified version is distributed, the source must be distributed too.

GRAPHIC

Any picture or non-text item within any document. Most webpages contain a number of graphics in GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, animated GIF or Flash format.

GRADIENT

The gradual transition of two or more colors in a graphic.

GRANULARITY

A term used for when a larger piece of information has been broken down into smaller pieces of information.

GRAYSCALE

Images that have no color value (hue). The graphic image may appear to be black and white with shades of gray.

GREEK TEXT

The dummey text that appears on a webpage or mock up to illustrate the position and appearance of text. Also known as filler text or "Lorem ipsum" text.

GUESTBOOK

A form where a visitor a website can fill out information (usually name, e-mail address and comments) to be displayed privately to the webmaster or in the form of a webpage for all Internet users.

GUI

Acronym for Graphical User Interface. As you read this, you are looking at the GUI or graphical user interface of your particular web browser. The term came into existence because the first interactive user interfaces to computers were not graphical; they were text-and-keyboard oriented and usually consisted of commands you had to remember and computer responses that were infamously brief. The command interface of the DOS operating system is an example of the typical user-computer interface before GUIs arrived. An intermediate step in user interfaces between the command line interface and the GUI was the non-graphical menu-based interface, which let you interact by using a mouse rather than by having to type in keyboard commands.