| Word or
Term |
Description or
Explanation |
| W3C |
Worldwide Web Consortium - a group of people
who are charged with setting the standards for the evolving internet - they
issue RFC's (Request For Comments) and get feedback before deciding what the
best options are |
| WAIS |
Wide Area Information System - a set of
databases across the Internet which can be searched in a manner very close to
questioning in plain English |
| WAN |
see Wide
Area Network |
| WBT |
Windows Based Terminals (Windows Networking) -
where all the machines are running Windows |
| Web (The) |
see WWW |
| Web crawler |
this is an automatic program (sometimes called
a "robot") which explores the World Wide Web, following the links and searching
for information or building a database - such programs are often used to build
automated indexes for the Web, allowing users to do keyword searches for Web
documents - it is also the name used by one of the most popular publically
available keyword searching engines - this can be accessed using the
URL:
http://www.webcrawler.com/ or
http://webcrawler.com/WebCrawler/WebQuery.html |
| the WebCrawler is owned by America Online Inc
and operated at their Web Studio in San Francisco - it regularly reads all the
web pages it possibly can, and stores a huge database of indexing information -
if you point your browser at http://WebCrawler.com/ you'll see a form
into which you can enter one or more words - click on the [search] icon and, in
a few moments, the WebCrawler will search its database and send you back a list
of all the web pages that it knows about which contain those words |
there are many similar search engines, such
as:
OpenText - http://www.opentext.com:8080/
InfoSeek -
http://www2.infoseek.com/
World Wide Worm -
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/WWWW.html Jumpstation II -
http://js.stir.ac.uk/jsbin/ |
| Weight |
this refers to the density of the characters
within a typeface - e.g. bold, light, extra, demibold, extrabold, etc. |
| wget |
a web access tool, providing recursive
downloading using http and ftp to mirror archives and other sites, and
traversing to carry out other search/indexing functions |
| Whetstones |
this is a floating point version of the
Dhrystones test |
| White pages |
databases of information about users: email
address, telephone number and postal address - the name relates to the fact
that it is something akin to Yellow Pages! |
| whois |
pronounced "who is" - a utility which
interrogates the Internet domain name administration system and returns
ownership and other details of the specified domain name |
| Wide Area
Network |
a group of remote computers, i.e. not on one
site, connected over telephone lines or specialised data cables |
| Widescreen TV |
a format which displays pictures in the cinema
format, also known as 16:9 (for the ratio of breadth to length) - it offers the
advantage of allowing feature films to be broadcast in their original
version |
| Widget (set) |
under X Windows, "widgets" is the collective
name for buttons, sliders, menu bars, title bars, and all the other
paraphernalia that windows can have or contain - awidget set is a collection of
all the necessary widgets of a particular style - think "Toolbox"... |
| WIMP |
Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointer - a method by
which a user can interact with a computer without having to learn lots of
special words - it provides a much more intuitive 'view' of the computer and
its facilities than non-WIMP operating systems provide |
| Winchester |
old-fashioned term for a hard disc |
| Window manager |
this is the official name for the RISC OS WIMP
system |
| Windows CE |
(or WinCE to give it the official and
incredibly apt abbreviation) the cut-down version of Windows created for
consumer electronics applications- it is intended to be the operating system
for palmtops, toasters, washing machines and so on - Microsoft sometimes
describe it as a Real Time operating system, at which point embedded systems
engineers laugh a lot, since it isn't |
| WINE |
Wine Is Not an Emulator - a set of Linux system
calls which duplicate the functionality of equivalent Windows system calls,
allowing Windows applications to run under Linux |
| WMF |
Windows Meta File - usually with a 'WMF'
extension, this file is native to Windows and is a vector graphics format,
similar to RISC OS drawfiles - WMF files have no curves: these are simulated
with many straight lines and therefore translated files can lose detail and it
can be awkward to transfer text in a drawfile unless 'Convert to path' is
performed first - this type of file can be inserted into MS Word documents |
| Word |
a group of bytes considered by the cpu to be a
unit of data - in Acorn 32-bit computers, a word is four 8-bit bytes |
| Worm |
the Internet equivalent of a virus - it
replicates itself and is self propagating |
| WP |
Word-Processing - in the early days of
microcomputers, word-processing was limited to handling text to create
documents - these days, however, many of the programs that are referred to as
word-processors can also handle pictures, so the distinction between WP and DTP
is becoming less clear |
| Writable icon |
a submenu into which you can type some
information such as a filename |
| Write-protect |
open the tag at the corner of a floppy disc in
order to protect the contents from being edited or accidentally deleted |
| WWW (or W3) |
WorldWide Web - this is probably the main
reason for the Internet becoming more popular recently - it presents things in
the form of pages that can contain text, graphics and sound, and enables you to
wander from computer to computer all around the world just by clicking on
highlighted links - the pages are stored as files in HTML format and
transferred using HTTP |
| WYSIWYG |
What You See Is What You Get - in the days of
text-based word-processing, the screen display would only gave an indication of
which words would appear on a given printed page but often not much more than
that - WYSIWYG describes a system where the screen display shows the size and
positioning of all the text (and graphics) exactly as it will appear on the
printed page |
| WITHIWIG is another version of WYSIWYG but said
with tongue in cheek - it applies to those applications which are not quite
what they claim! |