Web Words

John Morley ­ Stan Gelber

Baud (Rate) ­ The term “baud” is an obsolete term denoting the number of sine waves or signal changes per second. It is frequently and incorrectly used in place of BPS (bits per second) in denoting the capacity of a modem or phone link. With current technology, many bits can be transported with each signal change, so that the effective capacity (in BPS) of a modem or line is usually much higher than its baud rate.

BPS (bits per second) ­ The speed (capacity) of a modem or phone line is correctly expressed as BPS or bits per second (bits are the ones and zeros that make up a digital signal). Typical modem speeds are 14.4 and 28.8 thousand BPS. BPS is what people usually mean when they say “baud rate.”

One thousand BPS is called a kilobit per second and abbreviated Kb/s or kbps. One million BPS is called a megabit per second and abbreviated Mb/s or mbps.

Browser ­ A browser is application software. Like all application software--such as word processors and spreadsheets--a browser is simply a set of instructions that tells your computer how to display the contents of a computer file. The two browsers that matter are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. A text-only browser called Lynx is also in use, but since it does not support graphics or sound, it's not even on the radar screen of those with an eye to the future.

Although a browser is specifically designed to read files downloaded from a network, it can also read files from your hard drive. In short, a browser has the potential of replacing your computer's desk top software (which lets you see and control the contents of your hard drive and was developed before the World Wide Web was even imagined). This is why the "browser wars" between Netscape and Microsoft are so vicious. The company whose browser becomes the defacto standard will control the most critical chokepoint of the computer/Internet industry for the foreseeable future.

Cache (pronounced like cash) ­Your browser doesn't actually read a file over the Internet. It first downloads (or caches) the file to a place on your hard drive called the cache. The file is then read “from cache.” In practice, this caching and reading happen simultaneously, through a technology called “streaming,” but that's another issue.

A benefit of caching is that once the file is downloaded, your browser can read it from cache more quickly than it can download and read the file again. You may have noticed how much quicker it is to go back to a page you have already read than it was the first time you read it.

Since your cache is stored on your hard drive, you need to clear it periodically to regain the storage space it uses. Most browsers let you clear your cache manually (in Netscape Navigator, on the Options menu, select Network Preferences), but will also clear your cache automatically when it gets too full.

Clients and (Host) Servers ­The purpose of virtually any computer network--and certainly the Internet--is to provide you (the user) with information in addition to what resides on your own computer. Toward that end, there are basically two types of computers on a network. They are referred to as clients and servers.

The client is your computer, the means by which you obtain information. The server (sometimes called a host server) is both the computer on which the information resides and the software that "serves" it to you. Clients are typically desktop or laptop computers. Servers are typically larger, anything from a large desktop computer to the largest of mainframe computers. For example, Healthlinks.net is simply a group of files that exist on a large computer, which is only one of thousands of "servers" connected to the Internet. Every computer that logs on to Healthlinks.net is considered a client.

On a private local area network (LAN) there may be only one server. More typically there would be at least two. One would be the file server, which "serves" documents and applications to clients on the LAN. The other server(s) would be a printer server, or a network server, that provide the LAN's clients with access to these other resources.

DSL Service ­DSL stands for Digital Subscriber Line service and represents a telephone company solution and competition to your cable companies high speed cable Internet access service. DSL will allow you to access the Internet at speeds up to 8 million bytes per second over a standard telephone line. While many telephone companies have started to offer this type of service, it is not universally available. Check with your telephone service provider for availability.

In order to use DSL you will need a new type of modem which in many cases can be obtained and installed by your telephone service provider.

E-mail (SMTP and POP Addresses) “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Post Office Protocol (POP)” are a set of software rules that are used to manage email. All browser and email programs use these protocols. Your ISP will normally have two servers setup to handle incoming and outgoing mail using these protocols. SMTP handles outgoing mail and POP takes care of the incoming mail.

In order send and receive email, the email program(s) on your computer must be configured to talk to the ISP mail servers. This can usually be configured in most browser and email programs within the options menu. To configure the program you will need to provide the SMTP and POP addresses of your ISP. If you don't already know the addresses, you can go to your ISP's website and look on the help page.

Several email programs such as Microsoft Outlook Express let you access multiple email boxes. You must specify in the options menu, the SMTP and POP addresses for each account you want to setup.

GUI - The letters GUI stand for "Graphical Users Interface", a visual interface built into most modern operating systems. Within the GUI you will see all of the controls, buttons and pull-down menus needed to operate your computer and use the installed application programs. The GUI provides an easy to use visual reference allowing you to use your computer without the need to understand command line statements or have extensive software-hardware knowledge.

(Host) Servers ­See Clients and (Host) Servers

HTML ­The letters HTML stand for Hyper Text Markup Language. It's the basic stuff of web sites and the acronym that people are most likely to sling around when talking about creating web pages. The “Hyper Text” part of the term refers to the basic functionality of web sites: hyperlinking (click on a hyperlinked term or button and you jump somewhere else).

The “markup language” part of the term indicates that HTML is less than a programming language, in that it can't be used to tell a computer to do any computational heavy lifting. Instead, HTML is a set of "tags" that tell a computer how to display what ever text is between them. For example: <B>Example</B> would cause the word “Example” to appear as bold text.

Tags get more complicated from there and to alleviate the tedium of working in raw HTML, several web page authoring programs are available, such as Page Mill or Front Page. But these programs leave their own artifacts spread throughout the HTML code, so that files created in one program usually won't convert completely to another and what is displayed by a browser may not be exactly what you expected. So most “real” webmasters--including those of us at Healthlinks.net--usually work directly in HTML for maximum control of page layout and better compatibility with all browser software. Several flavors of HTML exist and include SGML, XML and VRML

Installers ­Software has gotten too complex for mere mortals to install. Even a plug-in may consist of several different files that must go different places on your hard drive and then new instructions may need to be written in the files that tell your computer's operating system how to go about its business.

An installer does this all for you. It's like a tech support guy on a disk. The installer is itself a computer program (a set of instructions that tells the computer what to do). In practice, the installer comes to you either as a download from the Internet, or on a floppy disk or CD-ROM. This single installation file, which may be referred to as an installer, is really a number of files compressed into a single shell; one of which is the installer itself, the rest are the files being installed.

You typically run the installation by double clicking on the installation file. The installer takes over from there. It will give you progress reports through a number of dialog boxes shown on the screen, some of which may offer you options; or at least require you to indicate that you agree to many paragraphs of unreadable legalese that constitute the software's license agreement.

Continuing to press the Return key is usually the best option when presented with any of these dialog boxes. That being done, you have just successfully installed your new software.

In short, installers replace the ordeal of puzzling though many pages of installation instructions and messing with your computer's system files. Installing even the most complex programs can now often be accomplished by double clicking on the installation file and pressing the Return key a few times. 

ISP ­ ISPs (Internet Service Providers) provide your connection to the internet. It sounds obvious but gets a bit confusing since they are in the middle of more visible entities. In theory, ISPs lease a high-capacity connection to the Internet and then sell chunks of it. In practice, they are surrogate front line tech support. Customers expect ISPs to explain and tame the vagaries of the Internet; which ISPs neither own nor control. Customers also expect help with--along with free copies of--browser software, which ISPs neither make nor profit from.

To connect your computer to ISPs, you typically dial them up over the public phone lines, which ISPs also don't own or control, using a modem built by yet another company, connected to a computer you will expect your ISP to be able to make work with all that other stuff. In short, ISPs are the people plopped in the middle of making all the technologies work together. To further complicate the picture, an ISP can be anyone from a huge corporation (such as MCI or AT&T) or an entrepreneurial college kid sharing his apartment with a big computer and many modems. It's a young industry.

Java ­It's a bird... It's a plane... It's confusing. Java has been in the digital news so much lately that you might think you should go out and buy one. Think again.

In simplest terms, Java is a language for writing computer code (the set of instructions that tell your computer how to act like a computer) developed by Sun Microsystems Inc. This means that it's under-the-hood type stuff. Most people don't know what programming language was used to create their software and couldn't care less. It's like those Intel Inside commercials, which have more to do with share value and corporate ego than providing consumers with useful information.

What makes Java different is that it was designed from the start so that programs written in Java can run on any computer; unlike other programming languages that must be optimized for each operating system. This optimization requires software makers to develop separate products to run on Windows, UNIX, OS/2 and Macintosh. And the really big deal--from the Internet perspective--is that you no longer need software on your computer other than the operating system and a browser. That means no more plug-ins that have to be downloaded, take up room on your hard drive and never seem to be the right version.

What happens with Java is that when you click on a button--to say have patient records displayed--all of the computer code telling your computer how to display those records is written right into the code for the web page itself, unlike alternatives that could require you to have the right data base software loaded on your computer, or at least to have a plug-in.

The downside of this happy picture is that Java is often slow. Having Java code embedded in the code for a web page means that there is more to download--as if we don't already spend enough time waiting on the Internet. But none the less, it's promise of universal software has put most companies solidly behind Java; most except Microsoft.

It's not that Microsoft doesn't like Java. It does, but only as a programming language that can be optimized to run on Windows. It argues that a program written in a version of Java optimized to take advantage of features unique to Windows is a faster program. But there goes the benefit of universality. This doesn't bother Microsoft, which seems to prefer making its 90 percent of the market happier rather than making life easier for whomever else is out there.

Despite the controversies, Java seems here to stay. More students are now learning Java than any other programming language, which is a big deal, but only under the hood. As a consumer, don't feel you need to learn any more about Java than you already know about that Pentium II chip that Intel puts "inside."

Plug-In ­ An add-on feature that gives software (typically a browser or graphics program) new capabilities without having to install a new version of the software. Typical browser plug-ins give you the capability to see animations and hear sounds on a web site. An iChat plug-in is needed to use the Healthlinks.net chat room.

Plug-ins are usually available for free download from web sites operated by the companies making the software that is being enhanced. Typically downloaded as an "installer," the different components of the plug-in will install themselves where they need to go; so that the next time you launch the plug-in's host program it will be enhanced with the new feature.

Servers ­See Clients and (Host) Servers

Speed ­Stating the capacity of a modem or phone circuit as a speed (typically expressed in bits per second [BPS]) may initially make no more sense than saying that a truck can carry 60 mph of freight. But the convention makes more sense when you consider that the phone circuit is more similar to a highway than a truck and that modems can be considered on-ramps.

So rather than measuring speed along a phone circuit (which is the speed of light, 186,282 miles per second, and a constant), the speed of a modem or phone circuit refers to the number of bits passing a given point in one second. This is similar to determining the speed of a highway by measuring the pounds of freight that can pass a given point within a standard period of time: The larger the highway, the more pounds of freight per second can travel past a given point; the faster a modem or phone circuit, the more bits per second can travel past a given point.

URL ­ The letters URL stand for Uniform Resource Locator, what it means is an address on the internet. For example, the URL for Healthlinks is http://www.healthlinks.net. That first "http:" signifies an address for a site on the world wide web. URLs for a newsgroup begin with "news." The prefix "ftp" indicates a site from which files are uploaded or downloaded--as opposed to being viewed on screen. The letters "ftp" stand for file transfer protocol.

A webmaster typically uploads files to an ftp site on the computer that is hosting a web site. That host computer then makes the files available to view on line. The "www" is an optional indication for a site on the world wide web; some web site URLs do not include the www or may use a variation, such as ww2. The "healthlinks" in our example is called a domain name, which simply means an area within a computer. The "net" suffix indicates a network or directory. The other typical suffixes are .com for commercial, org for organization (assumed to be non-profit), edu for education and gov for government. URLs for sites outside of the USA typically end in two-letter country abbreviations, such as ca for Canada or jp for Japan.