Acronym Gumbo

What’s all that gibberish mean?

If you’ve ever asked yourself that question, then this post is here to help.
There are so many different acronyms, abbreviations, and otherwise confusing terms used in the “Web Developer World” that it is all too easy to get lost in a big heaping helping of Acronym Gumbo.

HTML

HTML is an acronym for HyperText Markup Language, and is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document – by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on – and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. HTML is written in the form of tags, surrounded by angle brackets. HTML can also describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document, and can include embedded scripting language code (such as JavaScript) which can affect the behavior of web browsers and other HTML processors.

Although it is *possible* to style certain elements of a webpage with HTML, it is strongly discouraged. HTML styling is deprecated since the advent and adoption of CSS. The entire basis behind CSS was to remove styling from structure. Hence, styling via HTML only defeats the entire purpose behind the invention of CSS.

DHTML

Dynamic HyperText Markup Language, or DHTML, is a collection of technologies used together to create interactive and animated web sites by using a combination of a static markup language (such as HTML), a client-side scripting language (such as JavaScript), a presentation definition language (such as CSS), and the Document Object Model.

DHTML allows scripting languages to change variables in a web page’s definition language, which in turn affects the look and function of otherwise “static” HTML page content, after the page has been fully loaded and during the viewing process. Thus the dynamic characteristic of DHTML is the way it functions while a page is viewed, not in its ability to generate a unique page with each page load.

By contrast, a dynamic web page is a broader concept – any web page generated differently for each user, load occurrence, or specific variable values. This includes pages created by client-side scripting, and ones created by server-side scripting (such as PHP or Perl) where the web server generates content before sending it to the client.

XHTML

eXtensible HyperText Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax.

While HTML is an application of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a very flexible markup language, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. Because they need to be well-formed, true XHTML documents allow for automated processing to be performed using standard XML tools-unlike HTML, which requires a relatively complex, lenient, and generally custom parser. XHTML can be thought of as the intersection of HTML and XML in many respects, since it is a reformulation of HTML in XML.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

CSS can be used locally by the readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable.

JS

JavaScript, or JS, is a scripting language most often used for client-side web development. It is a dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based language with first-class functions. JavaScript was influenced by many languages and was designed to look like Java, but be easier for non-programmers to work with.

Although best known for its use in websites (as client-side JavaScript), JavaScript is also used to enable scripting access to objects embedded in other applications.

JavaScript, despite the name, is essentially unrelated to the Java programming language, although both have the common C syntax, and JavaScript copies many Java names and naming conventions. The language was originally named “LiveScript” but was renamed in a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun, in exchange for Netscape bundling Sun’s Java runtime with their then-dominant browser.

DOM

Document Object Model (DOM) is a platform – and language-independent standard object model for representing HTML or XML and related formats.

A web browser is not obliged to use DOM in order to render an HTML document. However, the DOM is required by JavaScript scripts that wish to inspect or modify a web page dynamically. In other words, the Document Object Model is the way JavaScript sees its containing HTML page and browser state.

Because the DOM supports navigation in any direction (e.g., parent and previous sibling) and allows for arbitrary modifications, an implementation must at least buffer the document that has been read so far (or some parsed form of it). Hence the DOM is likely to be best suited for applications where the document must be accessed repeatedly or out of sequence order.

XML

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own elements. Its primary purpose is to help information systems share structured data, particularly via the internet, and it is used both to encode documents and to serialize data.

It started as a simplified subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and is designed to be relatively human-legible. By adding semantic constraints, application languages can be implemented in XML. These include XHTML, RSS, and thousands of others. Moreover, XML is sometimes used as the specification language for such application languages.

XML is recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is a fee-free open standard. The recommendation specifies both the lexical grammar and the requirements for parsing.

RoR

Ruby on Rails is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language. It is often referred to as “Rails” or “RoR”. It is intended to be used with an agile development methodology, which is often utilized by web developers for its suitability for short, client-driven projects.

Perl

In computer programming, Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall, a linguist working as a systems administrator for NASA, in 1987, as a general purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and became widely popular among programmers. Larry Wall continues to oversee development of the core language, and its newest version, Perl 6.

The name Perl, along with it’s definition, was actually a bit of an “afterthought”. See, Perl was originally named “PEARL”, after the Parable of the Pearl from the Gospel of Matthew. However, Wall soon discovered that there was already a programming language named PEARL before Perl’s official release and changed the spelling of the name. After changing the name, it began being referred to as Practical Extraction and Report Language (Perl).

Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, sed and Lisp. The language provides powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data length limits of many contemporary Unix tools, making it the ideal language for manipulating text files. It is also used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, applications that require database access and CGI programming on the web. Perl is nicknamed “The Swiss Army Knife of Programming Languages” due to its flexibility and adaptability.

CGI

Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard protocol for interfacing external application software with an information server, commonly a web server.

The task of such an information server is to respond to requests (in the case of web servers, requests from client web browsers) by returning output. Each time a request is received, the server analyzes what the request asks for, and returns the appropriate output. The two simplest ways for the server to do this, are the following:

• if the request identifies a file stored on disk, return the contents of that file
• if the request identifies an executable command, run the command and return output

CGI defines a standard way of doing the second. It defines how information about the server and the request is passed to the command in the form of arguments and environment variables, and how the command can pass back extra information about the output (such as the type) in the form of headers.

RSS

Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.

Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s URI into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

URL

In computing, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) which also specifies where the identified resource is available and the protocol for retrieving it. In popular usage and in many technical documents it is often confused as a synonym for uniform resource identifier.

URI

A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a compact string of characters used to identify or name a resource on the internet. The main purpose of this identification is to enable interaction with representations of the resource over a network, typically the World Wide Web, using specific protocols. URIs are defined in schemes defining a specific syntax and associated protocols.

FTP

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a network protocol used to transfer data from one computer to another through a network such as the internet.

The term FTP refers to a file transfer protocol for exchanging and manipulating files over a TCP computer network. A FTP client may connect to a FTP server to manipulate files on that server.

HTTP

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a communications protocol for the transfer of information on the internet. Its use for retrieving inter-linked text documents (hypertext) led to the establishment of the World Wide Web.

HTTP development was coordinated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), culminating in the publication of a series of Request for Comments (RFCs), most notably RFC 2616 (June 1999), which defines HTTP/1.1, the version of HTTP in common use.

HTTP is a request/response standard between a client and a server. A client is the end-user, the server is the web site. The client making a HTTP request – using a web browser, spider, or other end-user tool – is referred to as the user agent. The responding server – which stores or creates resources such as HTML files and images – is called the origin server. In between the user agent and origin server may be several intermediaries, such as proxies, gateways, and tunnels. HTTP is not constrained to using TCP/IP and its supporting layers, although this is its most popular application on the Internet. Indeed HTTP can be “implemented on top of any other protocol on the Internet, or on other networks. HTTP only presumes a reliable transport; any protocol that provides such guarantees can be used.”

Typically, an HTTP client initiates a request. It establishes a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection to a particular port on a host (port 80 by default; see List of TCP and UDP port numbers). An HTTP server listening on that port waits for the client to send a request message. Upon receiving the request, the server sends back a status line, such as “HTTP/1.1 200 OK”, and a message of its own, the body of which is perhaps the requested file, an error message, or some other information.

HTTPS

HyperText Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer or HTTPS is a URI scheme used to indicate a secure HTTP connection. It is syntactically identical to the http:// scheme normally used for accessing resources using HTTP. Using an https: URL indicates that HTTP is to be used, but with a different default TCP port (443) and an additional encryption/authentication layer between the HTTP and TCP.

This system was designed by Netscape Communications Corporation to provide authentication and encrypted communication and is widely used on the World Wide Web for security-sensitive communication such as payment transactions and corporate information systems.

PHP

Hypertext PreProcessor, or PHP, is a scripting language, originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. It has evolved to include a command line interface capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications.

While PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, the main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is no formal specification. Released under the PHP License, the Free Software Foundation considers it to be free software.

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers.

ASP

Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft’s first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated web pages. It was initially marketed as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS) via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, but has been included as a free component of Windows Server since the initial release of Windows 2000 Server.

Programming ASP websites is made easier by various built-in objects. Each object corresponds to a group of frequently-used functions useful for creating dynamic web pages. In ASP 2.0 there are six such built-in objects: Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server, and Session. Session, for example, is a cookie-based session object that maintains variables from page to page. Web pages with the “.asp” file extension use ASP, although some Web sites disguise their choice of scripting language for security purposes.

AJAX

Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or AJAX, is a group of interrelated web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object or through the use of Remote Scripting in browsers that do not support it. Despite the name, the use of JavaScript, XML, or its asynchronous use is not required.

JAVA

Sorry to disappoint, but JAVA isn’t actually an acronym. The name was chosen by it’s developer from a list comprised purely of random words.

Java is a programming language originally developed by Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems’ Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture.

MySQL

MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) which has more than 11 million installations. The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.

MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase. The project’s source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements.

MySQL is officially pronounced My S Q L, not “My Sequel”. This adheres to the official ANSI pronunciation; SEQUEL was an earlier IBM database language, a predecessor to the SQL language. However, the company does not take issue with the pronunciation “My sequel” or other local variations.

MySQL is popular for web applications and acts as the database component of the LAMP, BAMP, MAMP, and WAMP platforms (Linux/BSD/Mac/Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python), and for open-source bug tracking tools like Bugzilla. Its popularity for use with web applications is closely tied to the popularity of PHP and Ruby on Rails, which are often combined with MySQL. PHP and MySQL are essential components for running popular content management systems such as Expression Engine, Drupal, e107, Joomla!, WordPress and some BitTorrent trackers.