Glossary of Terms

Pasted from HTML 2.0 spec, this is now under revision ...

attribute

A characteristic quality of an element, other than type or content.

browser

A tool used to read electronic books.

document

For the purposes of this standard, an HTML instance.

element

A component of the hierarchical structure defined by the document type definition; it is identified in a document instance by descriptive markup, usually a start-tag and an end-tag.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language.

HTTP

A generic stateless object-oriented protocol, which may be used for many similar tasks by extending the commands, or "methods", used. For example, you might use HTTP for name servers and distributed object-oriented systems, With HTTP, the negotiation of data representation allows systems to be built independent of the development of new representations. For more information see: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Protocols/Overview.html

markup

Text added to the data of a document to convey information about it. There are four different kinds of markup: descriptive markup (tags), references, markup declarations, and processing instructions.

MIME

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions as defined in Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies, 09/23/1993. (Pages=81) (Format=.txt, .ps) (Obsoletes RFC1341) (Updated by RFC1590).

representation

The encoding of information for interchange. For example, HTML is a representation of hypertext.

rendering

Formatting and presenting information to human readers.

SGML

Standard Generalized Markup Language as defined in ISO 8879:1986, Information Processing Text and Office Systems.

SGMLS

An SGML parser by James Clark, jjc@jclark.com, derived from the ARCSGML parser materials which were written by Charles F. Goldfarb. The source is available at ftp.ifi.uio.no/pub/SGML/SGMLS.

tag

Descriptive markup. There are two kinds of tags; start-tags and end-tags.

URI

Universal Resource Identifiers. Available by anonymous FTP as Postscript (www.w3.org/pub/www/doc/url.ps) or text (www.w3.org/pub/www/doc/url.txt)

W3

The World-Wide Web, a global information initiative. For bootstrap information, telnet www.w3.org or find documents at ftp://www.w3.org/pub/www/doc