Glossary - W
WAIS -- (Wide Area Information Servers)
Developed in the early 1990s WAIS was the first truly large-scale system to allow the indexing of huge quantities of information on the Web, and to make those indices searchable across networks such as the Internet. WAIS was also pioneering in its use of ranked (scored) results where the software tries to determine how relevant each result it.
WAN -- (Wide Area Network)
Any internet or network that covers an area larger than a single building or campus.
Web
Short for "World Wide Web."
Web page
A document designed for viewing in a web browser. Typically written in HTML. A web site is made of one or more web pages.
WebDAV -- (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning)
A set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allows multiple users to not only read but also to add, delete, and change documents residing on a web server.
In order to use WebDAV you need WebDAV client software to connect to a HTTP server that has the WebDAV extensions installed.
Virtually all common HTTP servers have WedDAV extensions available to them.
Website
The entire collection of web pages and other information (such as images, sound, and video files, etc.) that are made available through what appears to users as a single web server. Typically all the of pages in a web site share the same basic URL, for example the following URLs are all for pages within the same web site:
http://www.baytherapy.com/teenagers/
The term has a somewhat informal nature since a large organization might have separate "web sites" for each division, but someone might talk informally about the organizations' "web site" when speaking of all of them.
Wi-Fi -- (Wireless Fidelity)
A popular term for a form of wireless data communication, basically Wi-Fi is "Wireless Ethernet".
Worm
A worm is a virus that does not infect other programs. It makes copies of itself, and infects additional computers (typically by making use of network connections) but does not attach itself to additional programs; however a worm might alter, install, or destroy files and programs.
WWW -- (World Wide Web)
World Wide Web (or simply Web for short) is a term frequently used (incorrectly) when referring to "The Internet", WWW has two major meanings:
First, loosely used: the whole constellation of resources that can be accessed using Gopher, FTP, HTTP,telnet, USENET, WAIS and some other tools.
Second, the universe of hypertext servers (HTTP servers), more commonly called "web servers", which are the servers that serve web pages to web browsers.
What we achieve:
Glossary of terms
Please select the first letter of your subject
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Or select our search function
License
This Glossary of Internet Terms is licensed under the Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike" license.
The original author and copyright holder is Matisse Enzer, and the current version of the Glossary is available at
