Netscape, Mosaic, Lynx and W3 are examples of browsers for the World-Wide
Web. They act as clients to remote web servers. [WWW advertising] (CPM) n. Cost per
thousand exposures of an advertising
banner or graphic. The 'M' in 'CPM' is the Roman numeral for 1,000,
the traditional unit of exposures sold. Hundreds of emoticons have been proposed, but only a few are in
common use. These include:
(These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head
sideways, to the left.)
HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language)
<a name="baz"
href="http://machine.edu/subdir/file.html">foo</a>
where a and /a delimit an "anchor"
called "baz", href introduces a hypertext
reference, which in this case is a Uniform Resource
Locator (URL) (the thing in double quotes in the example
above). The text "foo" will be the label appearing on the
link in the browser.
A certain place within an HTML document can be specified by
following the document name with a hash (#) and the name of an anchor
at that position.
Other common tags include <p> for a new paragraph,
<b>..</b> for bold text, <ul>
for an unnumbered list, <pre> for preformatted text, <h1>,
<h2> .. <h6> for headings. [Internet Relay Chat] (IRC) n. A worldwide "party line"
network that allows one to converse with others in real time. IRC is
structured as a network of Internet servers, each of which accepts
connections from client programs, one per user. The IRC community and
the Usenet and MUD
communities overlap to some extent, including both hackers and regular
folks who have discovered the wonders of computer networks. Some
Usenet jargon has been adopted on IRC, as have some conventions such
as emoticons. There is also a vigorous native jargon, represented in
this lexicon by entries marked `[IRC]'.
Mailing lists are one of the primary forms of hacker interaction,
along with Usenet. They predate Usenet,
having originated with the first UUCP and ARPANET connections. They
are often used for private information-sharing on topics that would be
too specialized for or inappropriate to public Usenet groups.
Though some of these maintain almost purely technical content (such as
the Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list), others (like the
`sf-lovers' list maintained for many years by Saul Jaffe) are
recreational, and many are purely social. [games] (MUD) (Or Multi-User Domain, originally "Multi-User
Dungeon") n. A class of multi-player interactive game, accessible
via the Internet or a modem. A MUD is like a real-time chat forum with
structure; it has multiple "locations" like an adventure
game and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic and a simple
economic system. A MUD where characters can build more structure onto
the database that represents the existing world is sometimes known as
a "MUSH". Most MUDs allow you to log in as a guest to look
around before you create your own character. [portmanteau from "network etiquette"] n. The conventions
of politeness recognized in discussion forums, such
as avoidance of crossposting to inappropriate forums and refraining
from commercial pluggery outside the business forums.
If you want to nuke an article that you authored, simply use our Article
Nuke Form. Note that nuking an article does not eliminate it from Usenet
at large, only from the Deja.com archives. To alleviate this problem, we filter spam out of our database. This
greatly reduces the likelihood that you'll encounter spam-related
content while searching or reading Internet discussions through
Deja.com.
In addition, an increasing number of people receive spam via email.
This electronic form of direct mail advertising is more insidious than
the traditional (snail mail) form because there is virtually no cost
to the advertiser. For some people, being buried under hundreds of
spam messages each day has become all-too-real and problematic.
In order to address the threat of email spam, Deja.com offers all
of our registered users a free, Web-based email account. Using this
account removes the risks from actively participating in discussions.
Direct marketing firms won't be able to "harvest" and spam
your permanent email addresses, and the email received via My Deja.com
email accounts will be spam-filtered. If you haven't already, you may
want to register for My
Deja.com now! On the Deja.com site, we call threads discussions. URL
(Uniform Resource Locator)
Here are some example URLs:
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors/msdos/graphics/gifkit.zip
http://www.w3.org/default.html news:alt.hypertext
telnet://dra.com mailto:[email protected] http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/?Uniform+Resource+Locator
http://www.w3.org/default.html#Introduction
The part before the first colon specifies the access scheme or
protocol. The part after the colon is interpreted according to the
access scheme. In general, two slashes after the colon introduce a
hostname (host:port is also valid). Schemes include: ftp, http
(World-Wide Web), gopher or WAIS. The "file" scheme should
only be used to refer to a file on the same host but is often used
incorrectly as a synonym for ftp. Other less commonly used schemes
include news, telnet or mailto (e-mail). The port number can generally
be omitted from the URL and will default to port 80. The last
(optional) part of the URL may be a query string preceded by
"?" or a "fragment identifier" preceded by
"#". The latter indicates a particular position within the
specified document.
Only alphanumerics, reserved characters (:/?#"<>%+) used
for their reserved purposes and "$", "-",
"_", ".", "&", "+" are
safe and may be transmitted unencoded. Other characters are encoded as
a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. Space may also be
encoded as "+". Deja.com archives the discussion found in Usenet newsgroups and in
various other forums every day. To learn more about
Usenet, please read our General
Usenet Information primer. An extensive user community has developed on the Web since its
public introduction in 1991. In the early 1990s, the developers at
CERN spread word of the Web's capabilities to scientific audiences
worldwide. By September 1993, the share of Web traffic traversing the
NSFNET Internet backbone reached 75 gigabytes per month or one
percent. By July 1994 it was one terabyte per month.
On the WWW everything (documents, menus, indices) is represented to
the user as a hypertext object in HTML format. Hypertext links refer
to other documents by their URLs. These can
refer to local or remote resources accessible via FTP,
Gopher, Telnet or news, as well as those
available via the http protocol used to transfer hypertext documents.
The client program (known as a browser),
e.g. Mosaic, Netscape, runs on the user's computer and provides two
basic navigation operations: to follow a link or to send a query to a
server. A variety of client and server software is freely available.
Most clients and servers also support "forms" which allow
the user to enter arbitrary text as well as selecting options from
customizable menus and on/off switches.
Entries in this glossary were mainly compiled from The
Jargon File and the Free
On-Line Dictionary Of Computing (FOLDOC). These sites are
excellent; visit them often!
List of Terms
[communications, application] (BBS, bboard) (After a physical piece of
board on which people can pin messages written on paper for general
consumption). A computer and associated software which typically
provides an electronic message database where people can log in and
leave messages. Messages are typically split into topic groups similar
to the newsgroups on Usenet
(which is like a distributed BBS). Any user may submit or read any
message in these public areas.
[hypertext] n. A program which allows
a person to read hypertext. The browser gives some means of viewing
the contents of nodes and of navigating from one node to another.
Channels represent the most popular discussion topics on Deja.com.
They enable you to browse through thousands of Discussions,
Communities and Ratings quickly and easily. If you don't know exactly
what area a specific topic would be categorized in, or would simply
like to get a better idea of the vast array of information you can
find on Deja.com, you can click on a top-level channel, or main topic,
and navigate through the sub-channels, or sub-topics, to find
Discussions, Communities and Ratings. Here are the top-level channels
and the sub-channels they contain:
/C-P-M/
[Usenet] vi. To post a single message
simultaneously to several forums.
Distinguished from posting the message repeatedly (once to each forum)
which causes people to see it multiple times and is considered to be
bad form. Gratuitous cross posting without a Follow-up-To line directing
responses to a single follow-up forum is frowned upon, as it tends to
cause follow-up messages to go to inappropriate forums when people
respond to only one part of the original message.
n. Also known as a thread, a discussion is a more or less
continuous chain of messages on a single topic. To `follow a thread'
is to read a series of forum messages sharing a common subject. The
better newsreaders can present news in a discussion format
automatically.
n. The primary method for group communication on the Internet,
discussion forums include Usenet
newsgroups, mailing lists, corporate
discussion groups, and IRC (Internet Relay
Chat). Deja.com currently archives forums back to March, 1995, and we
plan to not only increase the history and breadth of our archive, but
also to add more types of forums.
/ee-moh'ti-kon/ n. An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional state
in email or news. Although originally
intended mostly as jokes, emoticons (or some other explicit humor
indication) are virtually required under certain circumstances in
high-volume text-only communication forums such as Usenet;
the lack of verbal and visual cues can otherwise cause what were
intended to be humorous, sarcastic, ironic, or otherwise
non-100%-serious comments to be badly misinterpreted (not always even
by newbies), resulting in arguments and flame
wars.
:-)
'smiley face' (for humor, laughter, friendliness,
occasionally sarcasm)
:-(
'frowney face' (for sadness, anger, or upset)
;-)
'half-smiley' (ha ha only serious); also known as
`semi-smiley' or `winkey face'.
:-/
'wry face'
[WWW advertising] n. One viewing of an
advertiser's graphical advertising banner by one user.
/F-A-Q/ or /fak/ [Usenet] n.
vi.,interj.
v. [Usenet] A message generated in response to another message (as
opposed to a reply, which goes by email rather than being broadcast).
Followups include the ID of the parent message in their headers; smart
newsreaders can use this information to present forum discussion in
'conversation' sequence rather than order-of-arrival. See thread.
n. [Usenet, GEnie, CI$; pl. `fora' or `forums'] Any discussion group
accessible through a dial-in BBS, a mailing list, or a newsgroup.
Contrast real-time chat via talk mode or
point-to-point personal email.
/F-T-P/, *not* /fit'ip/
[from CB slang] n. An electronic pseudonym; a 'nom de guerre' intended
to conceal the user's true identity. Network and BBS handles function
as the same sort of simultaneous concealment and display one finds on
Citizen's Band radio, from which the term was adopted. Use of
grandiose handles is characteristic of crackers, weenies, spods, and
other lower forms of network life; true hackers travel on their own
reputations rather than invented legendry.
[hypertext, World-Wide
Web] (HTML) n. A Hypertext document format used on the
World-Wide Web. Built on top of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup
Language). "Tags" are embedded in the text. A tag consists
of a <, a "directive", zero or more parameters
and a >. Matched pairs of directives, like <title>
and </title> are used to delimit text which is to
appear in a special place or style. Links to other documents are in
the form
n. A term coined by Ted Nelson around 1965 for a collection of
documents (or "nodes") containing cross-references or
"links" which, with the aid of an interactive browser
program, allow the reader to move easily from one document to another.
/I-R-C/
n. (often shortened in context to `list')
/M-U-D/ or /mud/
/net'ee-ket/ or /net'i-ket/
/net'n[y]ooz/ n.
/n[y]oo'bee/ n. [orig. from British public-school and military slang
variant of `new boy'] A Usenet neophyte.
This term surfaced in the forum talk.bizarre
but is now in wide use. Criteria for being considered a newbie vary
wildly; a person can be called a newbie in one forum while remaining a
respected regular in another. The label `newbie' is sometimes applied
as a serious insult to a person who has been around discussion forums
for a long time but who carefully hides all evidence of having a clue.
[Usenet] (see also discussion forums) n. One
of Usenet's huge collection of topic
groups or forums. Newsgroups can be
`unmoderated' (anyone can post) or `moderated' (submissions are
automatically directed to a moderator, who edits or filters and then
posts the results). Some newsgroups have parallel mailing lists for
Internet people with no netnews access,
with messages to the forum automatically propagated to the list and
vice versa. Some moderated forums (especially those which are actually
gatewayed Internet mailing lists) are distributed as `digests', with
groups of messages periodically collected into a single large message
with an index.
[messaging] n. A browser program which enables a user to read messages
posted to forums.
Though Deja.com would like to index all articles for future perusal,
we understand that at times there are articles that people might want
removed from our archives. Our policy for doing this is simple: we
allow the article's author to remove (or nuke) their articles
at will.
v. To broadcast a message to an entire forum (distinguished from email
in that it is not sent from one person directly to another).
n. [World-Wide Web] (Or "crawler", "spider"). A
program that automatically explores the World-Wide
Web by retrieving a document and recursively retrieving some
or all the documents that are referenced in it. This is in contrast
with normal web browsers that are operated by a human and don't
automatically follow links other than inline images and redirections.
Although this term is used in general to mean any message that nobody
wants, it applies specifically to commercial messages posted across a
large number of newsgroups. The label 'spam' applies especially when
the post contains nothing of specific interest to the newsgroup
participants. If not filtered out, spam can account for as much as
two-thirds of the daily postings to discussion forums.
n. [Usenet, GEnie, CompuServe] Common abbreviation of `topic thread',
a more or less continuous chain of messages on a single topic. To
`follow a thread' is to read a series of forum messages sharing a
common subject or (more correctly) which are connected by reference
headers.
/U-R-L/ [World-Wide Web] (URL) n. (Previously "Universal").
A draft standard for specifying an object on the Internet, such as a
file or newsgroup. URLs are used extensively on the World Wide Web.
They are used in HTML documents to specify the target of a hyperlink.
/yoos'net/ or /yooz'net/ [from `Users' Network'] n. A distributed
bboard (bulletin board) system supported mainly by UNIX machines.
Originally implemented in 1979--1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom
Truscott, and Steve Daniel at Duke University, it has swiftly grown to
become international in scope and is now probably the largest
decentralized information utility in existence. As of early 1993, it
hosts tens of thousands of newsgroups
and a staggering number of new technical messages, news, discussion,
chatter, and flamage every day.
[World Wide Web, networking, hypertext]
(WWW, W3, The Web) An Internet client-server hypertext distributed
information retrieval system which originated from the CERN
High-Energy Physics laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland.
Credits
Information on this page has come from General Usenet Information primer.
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This page was updated on 28 March 2001