Glossary

CSS - Cascading Style Sheet

CSS is used to define the presentation of a document. Presentation includes colors, background images, layout and positioning. CSS is said to cascade because of its additive nature when being applied to documents such as HTML.

Document Type Declaration (DOCTYPE)

Not technically part of HTML, but is used by users (mostly browsers), to determine the type of document it is reading and where the authoritative reference document for this version is. This is used to make sure that the document is following all of the rules so that web browsers can display it properly.

HTML - Hypertext Markup Language

HTML is a markup language which means that special symbols are used within the documents to represent the structure. HTML defines the structure of a document such as it's title, headings, paragraphs and relationship to other documents. HTML is a type of data description language.

International Standards Organization (ISO)

The ISO is responsible for publishing standard ways of doing things, everything from building a house to programming a computer. When something is standardized and everyone follows these standards then it is possible for very dissimilar things to communicate and understand each other. This is the reason that the ISO exists and is a big part of the computer industry at all levels.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a programming language in the classical sense as it contains directives to do "something". This "something" is normally likened to a verb in english, and the actions normally affect some type of data.

SGML - Standard Generalized Markup Language

SGML is a language that was developed to share different documents and still be readable by computers and humans for several decades at a time. Both HTML and XML are based on SGML, and serve similar functionality.

Universal Resource Indicator (URI)

The URI is simply some type of address that points to "something" in cyberspace. This "something" could be a web page, ftp directory or even another computer.

Extensible Markup Language (XML)

Extensible Markup Language was created after HTML but has gained wide spread acceptance quite quickly. XML was based off the same parent language as HTML but was given far stricter rules so that XML documents are easier to both read and parse by humans and machines alike. The extensible part of XML comes in the form of being able to add new features to a document with very little effort.