Glossary w

A network that by definition includes components that are relatively far apart, typically in different buildings, and almost always requiring connectivity through a telephone company.

Term referring to a service that the phone company provides, through which a pair of devices can send and receive data to each other, with the data passing through the telco's network.

Refers to the graph of the electrical signal on a wire, over time. A square waveform is used for the transmission of digital information.

A string of characters that can be used to uniquely identify a particular web page. Also known as a uniform resource locator (URL).

Software that resides on the computer that the end user uses. The browser requests a web page from a web server, and after the server responds, the web browser displays the information that a web server sends.

Software, running on an end user computer, that provides a user interface to the end user to display the web pages that are stored on web servers.

Term that describes the actual content transferred from the web server to a web browser. This typically refers to what is seen at one point in time in the web browser.

Software, running on some server computer hardware, that allows web browsers to connect to it for the purpose of retrieving web pages.

Jargon that refers to the web pages and web server that compose the web content for a particular organization or individual. This term typically includes all the web pages built by the company or person who owns the website.

A port number that a server purposefully uses for a particular application, so when client computers want to use that service, they know what destination port to put into the TCP destination port field.

A thin, long, somewhat cylindrical piece of metal that is used to transmit data. The wire typically has a plastic coating to provide strength to the brittle wire.

Typically a small room (hence the word closet) where all cables from all the computers run.

The combined set of all websites in the universe. Often, the term WWW is used to generally refer to the Internet, specifically in the context of all the websites available through the Internet.