Glossary

Accesskey An accesskey is an XHTML attribute. It is meant to help users who navigating without a pointing device, such as a mouse. Access keys are intended to be a means of specifying a keyboard shortcut for moving to a link, form component or other tabbable object, using the following HTML elements - a, area, button, input, label, legend or textarea. Use of accesskey is controversial. The current opinion of many accessibility experts is that, accesskeys mostly work against accessibility. And because of many conflicts, defining accesskeys seem to be a waste of time unless you are designing for a controlled environment such as an intranet. AJAX AJAX stands for or Asynchronous Javascript and XML. It's a way to utilize the abilities of Javascript, the Document Object Model, and XML to create interactivity on the web. For more information visit: AJAX (Asynchronous JAvaScript + XML or Asynchronous JAvascript using XMLHttpRequest) Applet A Java program or application designed to be embedded in, and invoked from, a web page, or other application. It cannot be run by itself. Attribute In XHTML, an attribute is a characteristic of an element. Backward Compatible Design that continues to work with earlier versions of a user agent, language, program, etc. Box Model In Cascading Style Sheets, the box model refers to the rectangular boxes that are generated for elements in the document tree and laid out as specified in the visual formatting model. Every element generates a box, which is call the element box. As the word "box" implies, these are rectangular in shape Each box is made up of a number of parts. In the normal document flow, the element boxes of block-level elements cannot overlap each other (floats and positioning are the exceptions). In other words, the way a page is laid out depends on the size of each and every box. Going down the page, in broad terms, each box begins just below where the previous one ends. For more information See Box Model. Breadcrumbs Breadcrumbs are a type of web navigation where current location within the website is indicated by a list of pages above the current page in the hierarchy, up to the main page. It not only shows users where they are currently located in the site's architecture, but it also lets them back up levels one at a time. It is a recursive path. For more information see: Breadcrumbs Top Browser The software on a computer that allows websites to be rendered so they can be "read" by users. This maybe a browser that renders things visually, in a manner confined to text only, or in any other manner that may be appropriate, such as voice output.. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Style sheets refer to a set of rules that allow you to control how you would like your document to be rendered. It is a mechanism to primarily separate presentation from content. With the HTML and style sheets approach, structured content goes into the HTML document, and the appearance, or presentation information goes into a style sheet. CSS allow you to control the rendering of elements on a web page without compromising its structure. Before CSS , nearly all of the presentational attributes of an HTML document were contained within the HTML code; all font colors, background styles, alignment specification, boxes, borders, and sizes had to be explicitly described, often repeatedly, in the midst of the HTML code. CSS allows web designers to extract this information, resulting in considerably simpler HTML code, supplemented by an auxiliary style sheet written in the language of CSS . The structure and semantic markup is restricted to the HTML code, while the presentational markup is restricted to the CSS code. For more information visit: Cascading Style Sheets. Click Here The phrase "click here" is a bad linking practice. It makes navigating the web difficult for both sighted and unsighted users. Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context. For more information see: "Click here" don't use it... Content Management System A content management system separates the content of a Web site from its code, allowing nontechnical users to update, approve and post content Top Deprecated A deprecated element or attribute is one that has been outdated by newer constructs. Deprecated elements may become obsolete in future versions of HTML . Authors should avoid using deprecated elements and attributes. The W3C recommends in Checkpoint 11.2 that deprecated elements and attributes not be used, mostly because they force styles and design upon a user instead of using style sheets that allow a user to override the default style. A listing of deprecated elements and attributes can be found at: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/index/elements.html and http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/index/attributes.html. Dithering In computer graphics, dithering is a method of creating additional colors and shades from an existing palette by interspersing pixels of different color in computer graphics to create additional colors and shades from an existing palette by interspersing pixels of different colors Dots Per Inch (DPI) Dots Per Inch is a term that also refers to printing and the amount of ink that actually is placed upon the print medium. Dots Per Inch is a property of a print graphic and determines how it prints - its size and quality. Color printing isn't done in continuous color, it's done with individual dots of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK), lots of them, giving an impression of continuity. These are the dots in dpi. Dots per inch (number of pixels) also measures resolution on output devices such as monitors and printers. The horizontal and/or vertical density of the output device, is arrived at by dividing the resolution of the device by the physical dimensions of its imaging region. A Mac monitor is typically 72 dpi. A PC monitor is typically 96 dpi. Most laser printers have output resolution of 300-600 dpi and produce good results with images which have image resolution of 72-150 ppi. Extensible Markup Language (XML) -See XML. An external type of style sheet is a separate file apart from the HTML file(s). The external style sheet is given a .css extension. It is associated to the HTML document using a link element or an @ import directive in the head of the html document. Any html document associated to an external style sheet gets the styles, and that is where the maintenance power of CSS is found. Not only do external style sheets allow reuse of rules within one specific document. They allow the style sheet itself to be shared across multiple documents. Using external CSS allows you to maintain a single style sheet for an entire site. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) File Transfer Protocol is a method to upload and download files over the Internet. Flash Flash is a multimedia special effects plug-in developed by Macromedia. For more information see Flash. Font-size The value used with the em-box to scale a font for display. CSS defines the font size to be "the size of the font when set solid. This means that the height of the font is the distance from the highest point in the highest glyph to the lowest point in the lowest glyph. Frames A feature of HTML, that allows a web author to divide a page into two or more separate windows. If the frame does not have a <title> element, or the <title> element is not meaningful this can cause accessibility issues. In addition, some browsers do not support frames. GUI Abbreviation for "Graphical User Interface". It is pronounced "GOOEY". Hexadecimal Hexadecimal numbers are used in HTML and CSS, and other computing applications, to represent colors. The bytes represent the red, green and blue components of the color. One byte represents a number in the range 00 to FF (in hexadecimal notation), or 0 to 255 in decimal notation. The hex triplet is formed by concatenating three bytes in hexadecimal notation. The system uses numbers from 0 to 9 and letters from a to f in any combination of six (and starting with an octothorpe) to represent the correlating red, green, and blue colors (#RRGGBB). e.g. #FFFFFF = 255, 255, 255 = white. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) The markup language that is used on most of the World Wide Web to create web pages. The standards for HTML are controlled by the W3C. Java An object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems. It was specifically designed for the distributed environment of the Web and can be used to create applications that can run on a single computer or distributed among several computers in a network. It can also be used to write applets. JavaScript JavaScript is a client-side scripting language that allows dynamic behavior to be specified within HTML documents. JavaScript is not Java. Java is a full programming language similar to C. JavaScript is similar to C, but is only a scripting language, and cannot be used to write full blown applications. For accessibility reasons, JavaScript should not be relied on. For more information see JavaScript Accessibility. Look and Feel Look and feel is the visual appearance that identifies a web site. It is comprised of a consistent color scheme, layout, typography, design treatments and graphic elements - all of which should work in harmony. Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum or Lipsum is random text. It is a common piece of garble that designers use as mock-content when testing layouts. It has been well established that if you write anything in a sample layout or design, people will spend more time reading the copy than looking at the full concept. "Lorem ipsum dolor" is sufficiently like ordinary text to show "text goes here" but it doesn't distract the reader. For more information see: lipsum.com. MySQL MySQL is officially pronounced "My Ess Que Ell'' not MY-SEQUEL. But they try to avoid correcting people who say MY-SEQUEL :-) MySQL is a popular relational database system. It is open source and integrates well with PHP. In addition to supporting standard SQL (ANSI), it compiles on a number of platforms and has multithreading abilities on Unix servers, which make for great performance. Navigation Navigation is the process of finding things in large or complex information spaces, such as on websites. Its purpose is to a help users find the content they want quickly. There are many navigation methods to make a website easy to navigate. For more information see: Navigation. PHP PHP is an acronym for PHP hypertext Preprocessor. It is a server side scripting language for creating dynamic web pages. This means that it works within an HTML document to confer to it the capacity of generating content on demand. You can convert your site into a web application, not just a collection of static pages. If you've ever seen ASP, you'll be familiar with embedding code within an HTML page. Like ASP, PHP script is processed by the Web server. After the server plays with the PHP code, it returns plain old HTML back to the browser. This kind of interaction allows for some pretty complex operations Pixel The word "pixel" is derived from "picture element". In graphics, it refers to smallest resolvable rectangular area of an image. It is how how monitors divide the display screen into thousands or millions of individual dots. In CSS, a pixel is a relative unit of measure dependent on the viewing device. They are relative to monitor resolution in contrast to percent and em that are relative to a browser setting. Percent and em are considered best practice for accessibility. Pixels Per Inch (PPI) Pixels Per Inch (PPI) is the resolution of an image file. Web graphics and screenshots are made up of dots called pixels, and they usually contain 72 pixels per inch, though other resolutions are common. The horizontal and/or vertical density of an operating system's graphical display, from the point of view of the operating system (and in turn, of the applications and images running on it). Plug-in A module (either hardware or software) that adds a special feature to a larger system or program. For example, a program to allow a browser to play movies or to display Flash content. Plug-ins have accessibility issues. For more information see: Plugins, PDF, PowerPoint, etc. RSS RSS is a technology that notifies you when a web site is updated, and allows you to read the updates without visiting the site itself. For more information visit What is XML (RSS) Syndication? Screenshots Screenshots are a method where the user takes screen snapshots at different times during the execution of a task or series of tasks. Like most user testing, you provide the user with the site and have him or her perform various user tasks with on it. In addition, you provide the user with a snapshot program and instructions for when and how to take the screen snapshots. This technique is best used in the early to middle stages of development, when you have some working site to be evaluated but are not to the point of requiring full testing. Snapshots are most often used in conjunction with other remote inquiry methods, such as journaled sessions or self-reporting logs. Typography Typography is the balance and interplay of letterforms on a web page. It helps the user understand the form and absorb the substance of the page content. It is important in both visual and verbal communication. Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) XHTML is a reformation of HTML as an XML vocabulary. This is a good idea, as it eliminates a lot of the problems that arose from the existence of proprietary or badly coded HTML , because it must now follow the strict rules of XML . XHTML is an XML application that specifies how XML can be used to describe a web page. XHTML documents look very similar to HTML documents, except they follow the rules of XML (which include things like all tags must have a matching closing tag, attributes must be quoted, tags must be nested properly and there must be a root tag for the overall document). XHTML is a subset of XML , but XML is not a subset of XHTML.The ultimate goal of using XHTML is to separate display/presentation tags from the document data/structure and to use the elements as they were meant to be used. The key change to make, is separating presentation from content. Extensible Markup Language (XML) XML A language specification from the W3C that allows users to develop their own markup languages (often called vocabularies), and format their documents using stylesheets to be presented on a browser if desired. It is a syntax/format, establishing rules for XML -compliant languages with a very strict set of rules that must be adhered to, allowing lots of control over document format. Extensible Style Language (XSL) XSL is a W3C specification that contains 3 parts. Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) for changing the formatting and structure of markup according to a set of rules, Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) for applying a strong set of rules to a document to ensure reliable formatting when printed, and XPath to select the elements required by an XSLT. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) An international consortium of companies and organizations involved with the Internet and the World Wide Web, responsible for maintaining web technology standards, such as HTML and CSS. It was "created in October 1994, to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability." Visit the W3C site for more information.