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Glossary

Address
The Uniform Resource Locator, or address, of a web page. Like the phone number of a particular person, this is unique and goes direct to the web page until which it is associated.

Email
(Electronic mail) Email is a service that sends messages across the Internet from one human user to another. Like a letter, email is person-to-person and it stores messages until they are read.

FAQ’s
(Frequently Asked Questions) A FAQ is a list of questions and their answers, which are commonly asked. These are published on the website of a product or service, so that the same question is not asked of the supplier, over and over again. A good example of a FAQ, which focuses on web security, is at http://www.w3.org/Security/Faq/www-security-faq.html

Internet
A large collection of computers, connected together to allow them to share information with one another.

PC
Personal computer.

PDF format
(Portable Document Format) A PDF is a type of computer file (in the same way that an MP3 or a Microsoft Word file is a type of file), which is commonly used on the Internet for presenting documents. PDFs are excellent for printing out – a printed PDF generally looks much better than a printed (HTML) Web page. PDFs are thus mainly used for material which the user is expected to print out (such as Government forms, brochures, reports), rather than material which is meant to be viewed online. PDFs require a specific piece of software, a PDF viewer, to be viewed and printed out. By far the most common PDF viewer is Adobe Acrobat, which is available for free online.

Search engine
A program running on a web server computer that creates and maintains a directory of web pages on the Internet. The engine has a web page with a form; you type in words describing what you are looking for; the engine looks up its directory and sends back a list of web pages that it thinks will fit your search criteria.

Website
A website is a collection of web pages which displays information on a particular topic. Common types of websites include company websites (information about the company), online shops (where you buy goods and services and pay by credit card) and personal websites (where individuals share their interests). A website may consist of just one page of information, but will usually contain several pages, all linked together. All the pages in a website usually share the same ‘domain’ name. For example, all the pages in the large online shop Amazon have an address (URL) that starts with ‘www.amazon.com’.
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