Glossary of Internet Terms

Letter W

©2002 by Walt Howe
(last updated 30 May 2002)

 

Select the first character of the term you want to look up or use the Search link on the left.

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This Internet Glossary is growing. Terms and definitions are being added all the time. If you have comments, corrections, or suggested additions, please send them to Walt Howe using the form at the end of the Glossary. My thanks for the many suggestions that already have been included.

Web Developers! See how to link to terms in the glossary from your web page.

W

 

W3C
Abbreviation for the World Wide Web Consortium, the organization that develops standards for the web community.
WAIS
Wide Area Information Server (WAIS). An indexing system for documents that indexes the full text of the documents, and scores searches on the basis of the relevance of its vocabulary to the search terms.

See History.

WAN
Wide Area Network.
WAP
Wireless Application Protocol. A protocol used with small handheld devices with small file sizes.
wareZ
Software pirated by dOoDz (immature scofflaws).
web site
One or more connected web pages under a common ownership or management or theme.
weblog
See blog
webtag
A term unique to Delphi Forums which designates a particular Forum on that service. Every Forum has its own webtag, different from all others, which forms part of the address for web pages, message boards, and chat rooms for that Forum. Addresses take these forms:
  • Main web page: http://forums.delphiforums.com/webtag/
  • Start page: http://forums.delphiforums.com/webtag/start
  • Message board: http://forums.delphiforums.com/webtag/messages
  • Chat room: http://forums.delphiforums.com/webtag/chat

Replace 'webtag' with the actual webtag to link to the appropriate place. If you are linking to the web page, message board, or chat room, use the appropriate anchor tag, which will be one of these:

  • <a href="http://forums.delphiforums.com/webtag/"> WebPageName</a>
  • <a href="http://forums.delphiforums.com/webtag/start"> WebPageName Start Page</a>
  • <a href="http://forums.delphiforums.com/webtag/messages"> WebPageName Message Board</a>
  • <a href="http://forums.delphiforums.com/webtag/chat"> WebPageName Chat</a:>
whois
An Internet utility that you can use to look up information about an Internet site in the registry database at Internic or elsewhere. You can enter a name like Delphi, a domain address like delphiforums.com, or a full or partial IP address and get information on the site's name, address, points of contact, etc. The utility can be run with your own ISP or net account, or you can use the Network Solutions Whois web page for domain names and the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN) for IP addresses. There are also WHOIS servers in Europe (RIPE), Australia, and Asia-Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC). Many more WHOIS servers are maintained for particular organizations. A very complete list of Internet WHOIS servers is kept at MIT. NetLab is an excellent Win 95 freeware program that includes whois and other utilities. WS-FTP Pro, an excellent shareware FTP program, also provides whois and other utilities in its package. If you don't know where a domain is registered, use Allwhois.com.

wi-fi
Short for wireless fidelity, a standard for wireless ethernet. The term is synonymous with the IEEE 802.11b standard.
World Wide Web (WWW)
The World Wide Web is an Internet protocol that makes use of the HTML, hypertext, and hypermedia to create pages with links to other pages. WWW pages can include graphics, audio, and video as well as text. See the WWW FAQ and the Internet History for more information.
worm
A self-replicating program that reproduces itself over a network. The most famous worm is the one created by Robert Morris at Cornell that shut down many unix computers on the Internet in 1988. Currently making the rounds is a Windows worm named happy99.exe (or Trojan-Happy99 or I-Worm.Happy) that masquerades as a fireworks show, replaces your wsock32.dll file, and sends copies of itself along with e-mail or news messages you post. For more on this and how to remove it, see the Symantec Anti-Virus Research Center Happy99 Worm page. See virus and Trojan horse.
WYSIWYG
Acronym for "What You See Is What You Get". The term applies to word processors and web page development software where you manipulate text and images directly without writing codes (such as HTML or dot codes) for each attribute.

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For Web Developers: How to Link to the glossary terms.
You can link to any term in this glossary with a link in this form:

http://www.walthowe.com/glossary/*.html#term

Replace the asterisk in *.html with the first letter of the term you are linking to. Terms with more than one word will generally use an underline to link the words.

What terms would you like to see added to this Glossary? Do you have any questions, comments, corrections or suggestions for improvement? Post a message in our Suggestion Form and we will give your ideas prompt consideration.