Cary Antill's Draft: Web Development - Glossary

(From Wikipedia - click on term for full entry)

Web Page Level

Web page: a resource on the World Wide Web, usually in HTML/XHTML format (the file extensions are typically htm or html) and with hypertext links to enable navigation from one page or section to another. Web pages often use associated graphic files to provide illustration, and these too can be clickable links. A web page is displayed using a web browser.
HTML: a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. HTML is used to structure information - denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists and so on - and can be used to describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document.
XHTML: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same expressive possibilities as HTML, but a stricter syntax.XHTML can be thought of as the intersection of HTML and XML in many respects, since it is a reformulation of HTML in XML. See also: W3 info.
XML: The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet. See also: xml.org
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML.

Browser Level

Web browser: A software application that enables a user to display and interact with web pages hosted by web servers. Popular browsers available for personal computers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Netscape, Apple Safari and Konqueror.
Document Object Model (DOM): a description of how a HTML or XML document is represented in an object-oriented fashion. DOM provides an application programming interface to access and modify the content, structure and style of the document
Client-side scripting: generally refers to the class of computer programs on the web that are executed client-side, by the user's web browser, instead of server-side (on the web server). This type of computer programming is an important part of the Dynamic HTML (DHTML) concept, enabling web pages to be scripted; that is, to have different and changing content depending on user input, environmental conditions (such as the time of day), or other variables.
DHTML: Dynamic HTML or DHTML is a method of creating interactive web sites by using a combination of static markup language HTML, a client-side scripting language (such as JavaScript), and the presentation definition language Cascading Style Sheets and the Document Object Model.
Javascript: an object-based scripting programming language based on the concept of prototypes. The language is best known for its use in websites, but is also used to enable scripting access to objects embedded in other applications. Despite the name, JavaScript is only distantly related to the Java programming language, the main similarity being their common debt to the C programming language.
Flash: a client application available in most web browsers. It features support for vector and raster graphics, a native scripting language called ActionScript and bidirectional streaming of audio and video. Flash is commonly used to create animations, advertisements, design elements on a web page, add video to web sites and more recently, to develop Rich Internet Applications.
ActionScript: an ECMAScript-based programming language used for scripting Macromedia Flash movies and applications. Since both ActionScript and JavaScript are based on the same ECMAScript syntax, fluency in one in theory easily translates to the other. However, while JavaScript's DOM is browser window, document and form centric, the ActionScript DOM is movie centric, which may include animations, audio, text and event handling.

Server Level

Web server: A computer that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from web browsers, and serving them web pages, which are usually HTML documents.

A computer program that provides the functionality described in the first sense of the term.
Server-side scripting: a web server technology in which a user's request is fulfilled by running a script directly on the web server to generate dynamic HTML pages. It is usually used to provide interactive web sites that interface to databases or other data stores. This is different from client-side scripting where scripts are run by the viewing web browser, usually in JavaScript.
PHP: short for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor", is an open-source programming language used mainly for developing server-side applications and dynamic web content. PHP allows interaction with a large number of relational database management systems, such as MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL and SQLite. PHP runs on most major operating systems, including UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, and can interact with many major web servers.
ASP: Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's server-side technology for dynamically-generated web pages that is marketed as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS). Most ASP pages are written in VBScript, but any other Active Scripting engine can be selected instead by using the @Language directive. JScript (Microsoft's implementation of ECMAScript) is the other language that is usually available.