Archive

Internet-Intranet Glossary of Useful Terms

By Samuel Greengard

Mar. 1, 1997

A list of commonly used terms relating to the Internet and intranets follows.


Domain: The name of a computer or service on the Internet—referred to by the characters following “@” in an online address.


Download: The process of receiving a file from another computer.


Firewall: Hardware or software that protects a private network from an unsecured or public network.


FTP (File Transfer Protocol): An Internet protocol for transferring files to and from another server over a network.


Groupware: An application that enables users to collaborate over a network.

Homepage: The first page of a Web site or group of HTML documents.


HTML (Hypertext Markup Language): The language in which World Wide Web documents are formatted.


Hyperlink: The linking mechanism that allows a user to jump from one Web page, graphic or document to another.


Internet: World’s largest computer network enabling users to send e-mail, transfer files, participate in newsgroups and access the World Wide Web.


Intranet: A private network that uses Internet software and standards.


Java: An object-oriented language, developed by Sun Microsystems, that creates distributed Web applications.


Newsgroup: An electronic bulletin board on which users can post and exchange messages.


SSL (Secure Sockets Layer): Provides authentication and data encryption between a Web server and a Web browser.


Upload: The process of transmitting a file to another computer.


URL (Uniform Resource Locator): A standardized character string that identifies the location of an Internet document. Also known as a Web address.


Web Browser: Software that requests and displays HTML documents and other Internet or intranet data.


World Wide Web: The Internet’s worldwide, HTML-based, hypertext-linked information system.


Workforce, March 1997, Vol. 76, No. 3, p. 82.

Samuel Greengard is a writer based in Portland, Oregon.

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