.arts for arts and cultural entities
.firm for business
.info for information services
.non for individuals
.rec for recreation and entertainment
.store for merchants
.web for Web services

e-mail (or) email
Short for "electronic mail". e-mail is quite simply, electronically transmitted mail on your computer. As opposed to "snail mail," e-mail sends your messages instantaneously anywhere in the world. It is the killer app of the Internet because of the capability to send messages at anytime, to anyone for less money than it would cost to mail a letter or call someone on the telephone. Linked by high speed data connections that create a global network, e-mail lets you compose messages and transmit them in seconds to one or more recipients across the office, the street or the country. Some of the more popular e-mail programs are Eudora and Hotmail, as well as those provided with your ISP. All you need is an e-mail account a computer and a program to get started.

FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
(pronounced: fak (or) F-A-Q). A list of questions and answers related to a newsgroup, software, Web site, or whatever. FAQ lists prevent newsgroup discussions from being overrun by common user questions. Finding and Writing FAQs - By Infinite Ink Newsgroup FAQs - Easy to use look-up for FAQs found on USENET.

Form
a.k.a. "feedback form" "interactive form". Sections of Web pages that accept user input. You can usually input comments, order products, or search for information with these forms. For example: Your Name E-mail Address usually a form is followed by "submit" and "reset" buttons to allow a user to either send the information or clear the form and start over. NOTE: the "submit" button is currently inactive.

Homepage
Also seen as "Home page" (or) "Home"
a.k.a. "Welcome Page". The first or "front" page on a Web site that serves as the starting point for navigation. Where the site's information actually begins. Also known as the Welcome page. This should not be confused with a buffer page or splash page. One Word or Two When used to refer to something belonging to an individual, person or group of people (a company for instance), or when used to refer to a place you want someone to visit or does not yet exist, the one word version is used - for example: - "Have you seen our/my homepage?" or "I gotta get a homepage up!". When talking about a Home Page as a piece of a larger Web site with many pages, in navigational directions on the actual Web site or once you have actually arrived at this place as in: "From the Help Page go back to the Home Page" or "This is our Home Page", the two word version seems to be more applicable. You may also see it written instructionally as just simply "Home" instead of Home Page. Sometimes an Internet service provider will offer a certain amount of disk space on their server for an account to put up their own homepage.

Host
A computer that functions as the beginning and end point of data transfers. Most commonly known of as the place where your Web site resides. An Internet host has a unique Internet address (IP address) and a unique domain or host name.

Host name
The unique name by which a computer is known on a network. It is used to identify the host in electronic mail, Usenet news, or other forms of electronic information interchange. On Internet the host name is an ASCII string, e.g. "wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk" which, consists of a local part (wombat) and a domain name (doc.ic.ac.uk). The host name is translated into an Internet address either via the /etc/hosts file, NIS or by the Domain Name System (DNS) or resolver. It is possible for one computer to have several host names (aliases) though one is designated as its canonical name.

Hyperlink
a.k.a. "link". The text you find on a Web site which can be "clicked on" with a mouse which in turn will take you to another Web page or a different area of the same Web page. Hyperlinks are created or "coded" in HTML. They are also used to load multimedia files such as AVI movies and AU sound files. SEE ALSO: broken links.

Internet
a.k.a. "the Net". Originally designed by the U.S. Defense Department so that a communication signal could withstand a nuclear war and serve military institutions worldwide, the Internet, was first known as the ARPAnet. A system of linked computer networks, international in scope, that facilitates data communication services such as remote login, file transfer, electronic mail, and newsgroups. The Internet is a way of connecting existing computer networks that greatly extends the reach of each participating system. For a brief history of the Internet click on the more button below for an article by Vincent Cerf, the father of the Internet.

Online
Being connected to the Internet via an ISP or an OSP. Used as an adjective, it describes a variety of activities that users do on the Internet, for example: online chat, online shopping, online games, online searching, online communities, and on and on.

Password Gate
A password gate is an area of a web site which needs a password to get to the next page, a "secret" page or a range of pages for preferred customers only.

POP
Post Office Protocol. The protocol used by mail clients to retrieve messages from a mail server. Comes in three flavors POP1, POP2, and POP3 the number denoting the different version number of the protocol.

POP-Ups
Advertising "pop-ups" are a way a company make sure you see their advertisement.
A pop-up is designed to appear on your screen as well as the page you are viewing.

Search engine
A program which acts as a card catalog for the Internet. Search engines attempt to index and locate desired information by searching for keywords in which a user specifies. The method for finding this information is usually done by maintaining indices of Web resources that can be queried for the keywords entered by the user. These lists are either built from specific resource lists (as is the case with a search directory) or created by Web programs, with insect names like bots, spiders, crawlers, and worms.

Server
A host computer on a network that holds information (e.g., Web sites) and responds to requests for information from it (e.g., links to another Web page). The term server is also used to refer to the software that makes the act of serving information possible. Commerce servers, for example, use software to run the main functions of an e-commerce Web site, such as product display, online ordering, and inventory management. You'll also hear this described as "shopping cart technology."

Snail mail
Regular mail as in "through rain, snow, sleet, or hail ..." The obvious connotation is that it is slow.

Splash Page
A "first" or "front" page that you often see on some Web sites, usually containing a "click-through" logo or message, or a fancy Flash presentation, announcing that you have arrived. The main content and navigation on the site lie "behind" this page (a.k.a. the homepage or "welcome page").

Web site
A home and/or location on the World Wide Web. A place made up of Web pages. These pages can contain graphics, text, audio, video and other dynamic and/or static materials. As with many Internet terms "Web site" is constantly used interchangeably with other terms, like home page and "web page". So you may hear someone refer to their "home page" when in fact they are talking about an entire "Web site". Some even refer to a Web site simply as a "Web page". When really a Web page is just a single piece of potentially hundreds of other pages making up the entire "site" and the home page is more correctly the "front door" or entrance to the "web" of other pages it is linked to on the site. The process of moving through a Web site is called navigation. A Web site is also considered to be simply any computer hooked up to the Internet and available via a hostname, domain name or URL.

World Wide Web
You're in it! -- the system by which you are viewing this document right now! Technically it is a global (Worldwide) hypertext system that uses the Internet as it's transport mechanism. In a hypertext system, you navigate by clicking hyperlinks, which display another document which also contains hyperlinks. What makes the Web such an exciting and useful medium is that the next document you see could be housed on a computer next door or halfway around the world. The Web makes the Internet easy to use. Created in 1989 at a research institute in Switzerland, the Web relies upon the hypertext transport protocol (http), an Internet standard that specifies how an application can locate and acquire resources stored on another computer on the Internet. Most Web documents are created using hypertext markup language (html), an easy to learn coding system for WWW documents. Incorporating hypermedia (graphics, sounds, animations, video), the Web has become the ideal medium for publishing information on the Internet. With the development of secured server protocol (https), the Web is quickly becoming an important commercial medium whereby consumers can browse online catalogs and purchase merchandise without worrying that their credit card information will be intercepted.

WWW
World Wide Web, You're in it -- the system by which you are viewing this document right now! Technically it is a global (Worldwide) hypertext system that uses the Internet as it's transport mechanism. In a hypertext system, you navigate by clicking hyperlinks, which display another document which also contains hyperlinks. What makes the Web such an exciting and useful medium is that the next document you see could be housed on a computer next door or halfway around the world. The Web makes the Internet easy to use. Created in 1989 at a research institute in Switzerland, the Web relies upon the hypertext transport protocol (http), an Internet standard that specifies how an application can locate and acquire resources stored on another computer on the Internet. Most Web documents are created using hypertext markup language (html), an easy to learn coding system for WWW documents. Incorporating hypermedia (graphics, sounds, animations, video), the Web has become the ideal medium for publishing information on the Internet. With the development of secured server protocol (https), the Web is quickly becoming an important commercial medium whereby consumers can browse online catalogs and purchase merchandise without worrying that their credit card information will be intercepted.