www.thewebtailor.co.uk
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www.thewebtailor.co.uk |
Inevitably, technical jargon and abbreviations turn the subject of website design into something of a foreign language. The aim of this site is to make the process as clear and straightforward as possible, which is why I have tried to avoid using too much jargon. But sometimes that is simply impossible. The technical descriptions, names and other aspects of the web language cannot be done away with altogether - you'll need to learn some of the language if you want to keep some control over your web project.
This glossary will try to explain the terms used on the site, but if you still aren't sure what I am going on about then you can either send me an email and ask, or visit www.whatis.com and look up the offending word there.
Bobby is a programme that evaluates a website against the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Sites that display the bobby approved logo must meet all priority one criteria in the guidelines.
Cascading style sheets provide instructions to web browsers that determine how a particular document should be displayed. The use of css returns to the original principle of the web: structured documents. This is important because users do not all have the same equipment. Since a designer cannot dictate the user's experience of the site visually, they must do so structurally, using style sheets to acheive the desired layout. Users with special needs or special equipment can then over-rule the style sheet to meet their own requirements. Sites that display the css logo must be using a valid css file.
Technically, the computer that your website is stored on. The term is also often applied to the organisations that provide hosting services. A good host is essential, if you want to avoid problems with your website. See the 31 steps to a usable web site for ten questions to ask potential web hosts.
HTML 4.0 is the final definition of the markup language used to create documents on the world wide web, before the transition to xhtml. Using html 4.0 enables proper integration of style sheets, and promotes platform independence (that is, it avoids proprietory tags which only work in certain browsers). Sites that display the html 4.0 logo must be written in valid html 4.0 code. All sites produced by thewebtailor validate to html 4.0, or xhtml 1.0.
When you create a website, you can provide links from your site to useful information on other sites. This saves you, and your users, lots of time, and, if done well, can add real value to your site for your visitors. However, sometimes the pages you link to disappear, or are moved. This causes linkrot - the link on your site no longer lead anywhere. Good designers minimise linkrot by doing two things: keeping content permanently located (disk space is cheap, after all, and just because I don't find a particular document useful anymore doesn't mean other people aren't referring to it), and checking off-site links on a regular basis as part of site maintenance.
Websites become dated quicker than you might think. Without regular maintenance, sites can begin to look old and unused. Since the web is an immediate medium, visitors to your website will expect it to be updated frequently. Even if all you do is move things around a bit on the homepage of your site, you should keep your content fresh and working with regular site maintenance. See thewebtailor's guide to maintenance for more information.
Like Microsoft's Access database (only it's continually being improved by the thousands of users/developers worldwide, it's essentially free and it works on more computers than it's Microsoft equivalent) MySQL is a database that uses SQL (Structured Query Language) to build, edit and examine database tables. This makes it fast, and effective, and a great way to build websites that have lots of data to manipulate - like timetables, membership data, sports scores, shop catalogues or archives of documents. MySQL integrates especially well with PHP and Perl to generate web sites which look up, or alter, information in databases.
Hypertext links which lead to pages on other websites (i.e. not part of your own domain, and out of your control). Offsite links are what make the Internet so powerful, and every site needs them in order to fit into the web, but they should be handled carefully. After all, you don't want your visitors leaving your site by mistake, do you?
Perl is a general purpose scripting language commonly used on Unix computers. It does a bit of everything, and despite this, it does much of it easliy and well. This makes it an ideal 'glue' for sticking together a dynamic website - integrating databases, interactive functions and basic html or xhtml pages. Perl is not difficult to learn, and many, many free Perl scripts exist for integration into web projects - many of which are simple to install even for novices. Perl is the most common method for producing CGI routines - you'll see many of them on the web, with filenames like dosomething.cgi or dosomething.pl - that's perl in action! For more information on perl, visit perl.com.
PHP - it's a recursive acronym (this passes for a joke amongst web developers), which stands for 'PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor'. What that means is that the file your browser requests from the web server is pre-processed by the PHP processor before it is served to your browser. Any PHP commands contained within the file are executed, and the results of the commands are included with the rest of the content of the file and delivered to your browser for display. So a page can look different depending on the results of the commands - which could be based on querying a database, or even checking to see which browser you are using to view the page - thus enabling changes to the layout to be made to accomodate different equipment on the user's desk. PHP is purpose-written for the world wide web, and is most often used to provide a web interface for database applications, such as e-commerce, discussion forums and catalogues. Find out more at php.org.
Extensible Hypertext Markup Language - the method by which web pages are written to make them fit the XML (Extensible Markup Language) format. XML enables documents to be produced for almost any purpose - and a 'document' can be almost anything. Formatting is kept strictly separate from structure and content, using technology such as cascading style sheets. The significance of xhtml for the web is huge - one document can be stored in xml format, and presented appropriately for desktop machines, WAP phones, PDAs, printers, screen readers and so on. Using xhtml - like thewebtailor - is what makes your website fit for the future. Yet the majority of web developers are still not using xhtml!