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Believe web development contains just as many ‘technical’ terms as the rest of the sector. To help you understand what we are going on about, take a look at our Glossary below:

A

Access Control

Involves the restriction of access to network realms such as certain URLS.

Age

Decrives the length of time since a response was sent or was successfully validated with the origjn server.

A Record (Address Record or Host)

Allows an IP address to map to a more human-readable domain

Authoriative Nameserver

Has been configured to provide answers for a specific domain

Authentication

Represents the positive identification of a network entity (a server, a client or a user)

Advisory Committee

Is a formal advisory body that is made up of representatives from the Internet community to help adivse ICANN on a particular issue or policy area

ASO (Address Supporting Organisation)

The ASO advise the ICANN Board on policy issues relating to the allocation and management of IP addresses.

B

BIND

Otherwise known as Berkeley Internet Name Domain, BIND is essentially an implementation of the DNS protocol

C

Content Negotiation

Is a mechanism for selecting the appropriate representation when servicing a request

CNAME

Or Canonical Name is an alias for a host record

Cache

Represents a programs local store of response messages and the subsystem that controls its message storage, retrieval and deletion

Cloaking

Cloaking is a method of redirection which hides the actual URL of your site from the viewer’s address bar via frames.

Certificate Signing Request

An unsigned certificate for submission to a certificationauthority, which signs it with the privatekey of their CA Certificate.

Certification Authority (CA)

A trusted third party whose purpose is to sign certificates for network entities it has authenticated using secure means

Cipher

An algorithm or system for data encryption.

Common Gateway Interface

A standard definition for an interface between a web server and an external program that allows the external program to service requests.

D

Digital Signature

An encrypted text block that validates a certificate or other file.

Directive

A configuration command that controls one or more aspects of Apache’s behavior.

DNS

DNS (the Domain Name System) provides mapping of hostname to ipaddress and back again.

DNSL

A DNS-based Blackhole List, or DNSBL, is a record created by an Internet site contaning a list of IP addresses.

Domain

A domain, or domain name, is what identifies a group of computers on the Internet.

Dynamic

In the context of an ip, dynamic implies that it changes frequently.

E

Entity

The information transferred as the payload of a request or response. An entity consists of metainformation in the form of entity-header fields and content in the form of an entity-body

Environment Variable

Named variables managed by the operating system shell and used to store information and communicate between programs.

F

First-hand

A response is first-hand if it comes directly and without unnecessary delay from the origin server, perhaps via one or more proxies. A response is also first-hand if its validity has just been checked directly with the origin server.

Freshness lifetime

The length of time between the generation of a response and its expiration time.

Filter

A process that is applied to data that is sent or received by the server.

Fully-Qualified Domain-Name

The unique name of a network entity, consisting of a hostname and a domain name that can resolve to an IP address.

FTP Server

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. An FTP server is simply a file server, a simple way for people to access files on a particular computer from any other computer with Internet access.

G

Gateway

A server which acts as an intermediary for some other server

gTLD Servers

The gTLD servers are a set of nameservers which contain information about all domains in the com, net, and org top-level domains.

H

Hash

A mathematical one-way, irreversable algorithm generating a string with fixed-length from another string of any length. Different input strings will usually produce different hashes (depending on the hash function).

Header

The part of the http request and response that is sent before the actual content, and that contains meta-information describing the content.

.htcaccess

A configurationfile that is placed inside the web tree and applies configuration directive to the directory where it is placed and all sub-directories.

HyperText Transfer Proactol (HTTP)

The standard transmission protocol used on the World Wide Web.

Hostname

A hostname (also referred to as a “host”), is a computer’s unique name on the Internet, which points to that computer’s IP address.

I

IP Address

An IP address is a numeric representation of a computer’s location on a network

ISP

ISP stands for Internet Service Provider. Your ISP is the company that provides you with access to the Internet, and assigns you an IP address

ICANN

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is an internationally organized, non-profit corporation that has responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions.

IETF

The IETF is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual.

ISP

An ISP is a company, which provides access to the Internet to organizations and/or individuals

M

Method

In the context of http, an action to perform on a resource, specified on the request line by the client.

MIME-type

A way to describe the kind of document being transmitted. Its name comes from that fact that its format is borrowed from the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. It consists of a major type and a minor type, separated by a slash.

Module

An independent part of a program.

Mail eXchanger (MX)

A Mail eXchanger is a type of DNS record that allows you to control the delivery of mail for a given domain or subdomain. Multiple MX records may be present, in case the primary exchanger fails.

N

Nameserver

A nameserver is a server which has been set up to answer DNS queries, and provide information about a certain set of domain

O

Origin Server

The server on which a given resource resides or is to be created.

P

Pass Phrase

The word or phrase that protects private key files. It prevents unauthorized users from encrypting them.

Phishing

Phishing refers to an attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by posing as a trustworthy person or business in an apparently official electronic communication, such as an email, instant message, or website.

Proxy

An intermediary program which acts as both a server and a client for the purpose of making requests on behalf of other clients.

PTR Records

PTR records are a reverse lookup for an A record. Due to the nature of DNS and the way reverse lookups work, PTR records can only be controlled by your ISP.

R

Registrar

Domain names ending with .aero, .biz, .com, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, .net, .org, and .pro can be registered through many different companies (known as “registrars”) that compete with one another

Regular Expression (Regex)

A way of describing a pattern in text

Resource

A network data object or service that can be identified by a URI, as defined in section 3.2. Resources may be available in multiple representations (e.g. multiple languages, data formats, size, and resolutions) or vary in other ways.

Reverse Proxy

A proxy server that appears to the client as if it is an origin server.

Root Servers

The root servers are nameservers that all other nameservers on the Internet know about, and contain very basic information about the DNS system, which will lead other servers along the path to finding out specific information about a host

RGP – Redemption Grace Period

Problems and complaints relating to deletion of domain-name registrations are very common. Businesses and consumers are losing the rights to their domain names through registration deletions caused by mistake, inadvertence, or fraud. Current procedures for correcting these mistakes have proven inadequate. To move toward a solution to these problems ICANN developed the RGP.

S

Secondary DNS

Provides backup DNS servers that download information from your primary DNS server and share its load.

Semantically Transparent

A cache behaves in a “semantically transparent” manner, with respect to a particular response, when its use affects neither the requesting client nor the origin server, except to improve performance. When a cache is semantically transparent, the client receives exactly the same response (except for hop-by-hop headers) that it would have received had its request been handled directly by the origin server.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)

A protocol created by Netscape Communications Corporation for general communication authentication and encryption over TCP/IP networks.

Stale

A response is stale if its age has passed its freshness lifetime.

Static

Static means unchanging, not moving. In the context of an ip, it means that the address stays the same each time that you logon or connect to the Internet.

Subdomain

A subdomain is somewhere in-between a domain name and a hostname. A subdomain adds another level to a domain

T

Tarpitting

Tarpitting refers to the practice of attempting to starve the resources of a spammer or hacker by holding open a connection until it times out

TLD – Top Level Domain

TLDs are the names at the top of the DNS naming hierarchy. They appear in domain names as the string of letters following the last (rightmost) “.”

Transport Layer Security (TLS)

The successor protocol to SSL, created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for general communication authentication and encryption over TCP/IP networks. TLS version 1 and is nearly identical with SSL version 3.

TTL

TTL stands for “Time To Live” and is the amount of time in seconds that a DNS record will be cached by an outside DNS server

Tunnel

An intermediary program which is acting as a blind relay between two connections.

U

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

The name/address of a resource on the Internet

User Agent

The client which initiates a request. These are often browsers, editors, spiders (web-traversing robots), or other end user tools.

V

Validator

A protocol element (e.g., an entity tag or a Last-Modified time) that is used to find out whether a cache entry is an equivalent copy of an entity

Variant

A resource may have one, or more than one, representation(s) associated with it at any given instant. Each of these representations is termed a `varriant’.

W

Web Redirection

Web Redirection (otherwise known as HTTP redirection) allows a short hostname to be substituted in the place of a longer, ugly, hard-to-remember (or otherwise unwanted) URL

W3C

The W3C is an international industry consortium founded in October 1994 to develop common protocols that promote the evolution of the World Wide Web and ensure its interoperability