Basic online terms!

What is a web browser?
When you sit down and look at web pages, you are using a web browser. This is the piece of software that communicates with web servers for you, translates HTML pages and image data into a nicely formatted on-screen display, and presents this information to your eyeballs -- or to your other senses, in the case of browsers for the vision-impaired and other alternative interface technologies. Web browsers also appear in simpler devices such as Internet-connected cell phones, like many Nokia models, and PDAs such as the Palm Pilot. The most common web browser, by a large margin, is Microsoft Internet Explorer, followed by the open-source Mozilla browser and its derivatives, including Netscape 6.0 and later. Apple's new Safari browser is gaining popularity on Macintoshes running MacOS X, and the Opera shareware browser has a loyal following among those who are willing to pay for the fastest browser possible, especially on older computers. The Lynx browser is the most frequently used text-only browser and has been adapted to serve the needs of the vision-impaired.

What is a web server?
Web servers are the computers that actually run web sites. The term "web server" also refers to the piece of software that runs on those computers, accepting connections from web browsers and delivering web pages and other files to them, as well as processing form submissions. The most common web server software is Apache, followed by Microsoft Internet Information server; many, many other web server programs also exist. For more information about web servers and how to arrange hosting for your own web pages, see the creating web sites section.

What is HTML?
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is a simple markup language used to make web pages. Although all modern word processors and many specialized tools can be used to make web pages without learning HTML at all, learning HTML itself is a useful way to learn more about the web and provides more control over the results. Luckily, HTML is very simple and quite easy to learn. We have an easy lesson in the tutorial section for you to do if you want!

What are web pages?
Every web site is made up of one or more web pages -- like the one you are looking at right now! This text is part of a web page, and is written in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). In addition to text with hyperlinks, tables, and other formatting, web pages can also contain images. Less commonly, web pages may contain Flash animations, Java applets, or MPEG video files. For more information and an example, see the HTML Lesson.

What is a URL?
Look up at the top of this web page. Above the page you will see the "location bar" of your web browser, which should contain something similar to this:

[Guest]

[62.814]

Googlebot, Yahoo crawler