• Home
  • Sustainable Design
• A Sustainable Web?
  • A Foreign Concept
  • Glossary of Terms
• Design Concept
  • The Importance of Visual Design
  • Design Impact
  • Potential Harm of Good Design
  • Getting Started Designing
• Material Treatment
  • You Are How You Treat
  • Naming Files and Folders
  • Naming for Indexing and Clarity
  • Naming for Versioning
  • Mistreating Your Images: 7 Deadly Sins
• Document Structure (XHTML)
  • The Concept of a Markup Language
  • A Brief History of HTML
  • Basic XHTML Rules
  • XHTML DOCTYPE Declarations
  • XHTML Tag Types: Block and Inline
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: Block-level Tags
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: List Tags
  • The Basic XHTML Tag Set: In-line Tags
• Advanced Document Structure
  • Working with Classes and IDs
  • Classes in Action
  • IDs in Action
• Document Presentation (CSS)
  • Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets
  • Some CSS Vocabulary
  • CSS Selectors
  • CSS Properties: Text and Font
  • CSS Properties: Margin, Padding, and Border
• CSS for Design and Layout
  • Background Images
  • Image Replacement Techniques
• Introduction to PHP
  • What is PHP?
  • Repeating Content Across Pages

Glossary of Terms

Alpha

A fancy word for transparency; certain graphic file formats, like the PNG, offer per-pixel alpha, meaning that they can blend into any image/color beneath them. Note, however, that Internet Explorer doesn't support PNG per-pixel alpha (though IE 7 is supposed to).

Apache

A common Web server, often run on Linux systems

Attribute

XHTML tags have both an element and a series of attributes. Attributes provide some additional information about the text enclosed by a tag; for example, the href attribute is added to the anchor tag, <a>, to determine where a link points.

Bitmap

A generic term for a type of image built on individual pixels; JPEGs and GIFs are examples of bitmap file types. Bitmaps can also sometimes be referred to as raster graphics. See the Vector entry below.

Class

In XHTML, class is an attribute that can be added to any tag element to identify the tag as part of a group. For example, a Web designer might decide to add class="external" to all of the links that take visitors away from her Web site. She can then refer to the external class in CSS to change all external links to red, for example.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets, the Web language used for controlling the presentation of HTML/XHTML documents

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language, the original language for Web documents. See XHTML.

SSH

SSH Client

Secure Shell or Secure Socket Shell, a secure communication protocol for controlling a Linux system remotely. An SSH Client is a piece of software that supports the protocol.

Vector graphics

In contrast to bitmap/raster graphics, vector graphics are based on mathematical calculations for lines, angles, and curves rather than individual pixels. This allows vector graphics to be scaled up or down with no loss of image quality. Because they are based on calculations, vector graphic file sizes are often much smaller than a bitmap counterpart. However, although the Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) standard is in development, it is not widely supported—so most vector graphics on the Web are done in Flash and require the Flash plugin.

XHTML

Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, the Web language for declaring the structure of text. XHTML is a revision of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) based on the rules of Extensible Markup Language (XML), and is intended only for the structure of documents, not visual presentation.

Updated on Thu. Sep. 21 2006 at 11:37AM