Glossary of Web Development Terms

Select the first letter of the word from the list above to jump to the appropriate section of the glossary.

Absolute Pathnames: An absolute pathname, also referred to as an absolute path or full path, is the location of a filesystem object (i.e., file, directory or link) relative to the root directory.
Anchors: Special places that you can link to inside documents. Links can then jump to those special places inside the page as opposed to jumping just to the top of the page.
Attributes: A part of an HTML tag that describes a characteristic of that tag (included inside its brackets). It may be assigned a value, although not always.

Browser: A program that interprets HTML files, formats them into Web pages, and displays them. You can use a Web browser to jump from one Web page to another by following hyperlinks, to download files from the Internet to your computer, and to play audio or video files that are embedded in a web page.

Cascading Style Sheets: An HTML specification developed by the World Wide Web Consortium that defines how authors of web pages can attach style sheets to Web pages. Style sheets define the appearance and formatting of content on Web pages and allow you to have more control over how content displays in Web browsers.

Home Page: The entry page for a set of Web pages and other files in a web site. The home page opens by default when a site visitor browses to a site by using a web browser.
Hypertext: A technology that allows a computer user to click on a spot in a computer file that will then jump them to a different file. Links in World Wide Web pages are examples of hypertext.
HTML: The standard markup language for documents on the World Wide Web. HTML is a subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). It uses tags to indicate how web browsers should display page elements such as text and graphics, and how web browsers should respond to actions such as the activation of a link by a key press or mouse click.

Link Menu: Links on your web page that are arranged in a list form or in some other short, easy-to-read, easy-to-understand format.
Logical Style Tags: Style of coding text that relies on the tags referring to the meaning, or function, of a desired effect. Examples: <EM> and <CODE>

Markup Language: Surrounding text with beginning and ending tags, typically set off in angle brackets. Translators must take care to leave the words in the tags alone. Translation memory tools that are markup aware (e.g., Trados, TagEditor) do not change tags, except for certain quoted material inside a tag attributes. e.g. HTML, SGML, and XML.

Physical Style Tags: Style of coding text that relies on the tags referring to physical appearance of the desired effect. Examples: <B> and <I>

Relative Pathnames: Points to files based on their locations relative to the current file. They can include directory names, or they can point to the path you would take to navigate to that file if you started at the current directory or folder.
Remote Pages: In networks, remote refers to files, devices, and other resources that are not connected directly to your workstation. Resources at your workstation are considered local.

Storyboarding: Provides an overall rough outline of what the website will look like when it's done, including which topics go on which pages, the primary linsk, and maybe even some conceptual diea of what sort of graphics will be used and where they will go.

Title: The part of the HTML document that is displayed at the top of the browser (not in the window>. In the code, it is contained in the Head.

Unordered Lists: A list that is not numbered. Bullet symbols are used instead of numbers. Tag associated with it: <UL>
URL (Uniform Resource Locator): URL is the abbreviation for uniform Resource Locator. This is a technical term for a whole web address, such as http://www.hooverwebdesign.com.

Web Server: A computer that delivers (serves up)web pages. Every web server has an IP address and possibly a domain name.
Web Page: A document on the World Wide Web. Every web page is identified by a unique URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
Web Site: A website, web site or www site (often shortened to just site) is a collection of web pages, that is, HTML/XHTML documents accessible generally via HTTP on the Internet; all publicly accessible websites in existence comprise the World Wide Web.

XHTML: Short for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, a hybrid between HTML and XML specifically designed for Net device displays. XHTML is a markup language written in XML; therefore, it is an XML application.