Glossary of Terms

HDML
Hand-Held Device Markup - The HTML for hand-held devices like Palm Pilots and PDAs. A simple language used to define hypertext-like content and applications for hand-held devices with small displays. HDML is designed to leverage the infrastructure and protocols of the World Wide Web while providing an efficient markup language for wireless and other handheld devices. Congruent with the capabilities and limitations of many handheld devices, HDML's focus goes beyond presentation and layout. HDML provides an explicit navigation model, which does not rely upon the visual context, required of HTML. As such, HDML offers an efficient means of providing content via the WWW infrastructure to handheld devices such as cellular phones, pagers, and wireless PDA's.

Hit
A term used to describe the accessing of a World Wide Web page. When a user "points" a browser to a Web site URL, the moment that user requests the HTML document is called a "hit". Hits are used to determine how popular a Web site is and plays an important role in assessing how much it costs to advertise on a particular Web page. Some Web site authors and developers use counters on their page to let people know how many other users (hits) have accessed that particular page that they are on. There has been great debate as to the validity of the "number of hits" pages or sites are said to receive due in part to Web servers that record hits not only on accesses to HTML pages but also the graphics, which are embedded in them.

Host
Any computer that can function as the beginning and end point of data transfers. An Internet host has a unique Internet address (IP address) and a unique domain or host name.

Hotlist
A list of frequently accessed World Wide Web sites. Usually the names of the sites are coded as hypertext, making them links. In this case the user must simply click on the name of the site in order to go there. (Yahoo! started as one major hotlist.)

Hotmail
Hotmail is a Web-based free email system which adheres to the universal HTTP standard. It is based on the premise that email access should be easy and possible from any computer connected to the World Wide Web. Web-based email programs use a Web browser as an email program, providing a globally retrievable form of email.

Htaccess
An .htaccess file is simply a text file containing Apache directives. Those directives apply to the documents in the directory where the .htaccess file is located, and to all subdirectories under it as well. Other .htaccess files in subdirectories may change or nullify the effects of those in parent directories. As text files, you can use whatever text editor you like to create or make changes to .htaccess files. These files are called '.htaccess files' because that's what they're typically named. This naming scheme has its roots in the NCSA Web server and the UNIX file system; files whose names begin with a dot are often considered to be 'hidden' and aren't displayed in a normal directory listing. The NCSA developers chose the name '.htaccess' so that a control file in a directory would have a fairly reasonable name ('ht' for 'hypertext') and not clutter up directory listings. Plus, there's a long history of UNIX utilities storing their preferences information in such 'hidden' files.

HTML
Hypertext Markup Language - HTML is the lingua franca for publishing hypertext on the World Wide Web. It is a non-proprietary format based upon SGML, and can be created and processed in a wide range of tools from simple plain text editors to sophisticated WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) authoring tools. HTML uses tags like <h1> to structure text into headings, paragraphs, lists, hypertext links and more.

HTTP
Hypertext Transfer Protocol - The protocol that tells the server what to send to the client, so the client can view Web pages, FTP sites, or other areas of the net.

HTTPS
Hypertext Transfer Protocol - A type of server software that provides the ability for secure transactions to take place on the World Wide Web. If a Web site is running on a HTTPS server you can type in HTTPS instead of HTTP in the URL section of your browser to enter into the "secured mode". Windows NT HTTPS and Netscape Commerce server software support this protocol.

Hyperlink
Web site text that can be clicked on with a mouse, that in turn will take you to another Web page or a different area of the same Web page. Hyperlinks are created (coded) in HTML. They are also used to load multimedia files such as AVI movies and AU sound files.

Hypertext
A system of writing and displaying text that enables the text to be linked in multiple ways, to be available at several levels of detail, and to contain links to related documents. The term was coined by Ted Nelson to refer to a nonlinear system of information browsing and retrieval that contains associative links to other related documents. The World Wide Web uses hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) to provide links to pages and multimedia files.