PANPLAN: A Strategic Vision for the City of Seattle Public Access Network

Appendix B - Glossary of Terms

The Internet: Worldwide network of computers connected via phone lines and other high speed communications lines. Started as a Department of Defense project to link research sites in the 1960's and expanded from there.

The World Wide Web: This is the graphical interface to the Internet. Technically it is a subset of total Internet activity, but to the end user it has the effect of providing a point and click interface to much of the information out on the Internet.

HTML: Stands for HyperText Markup Language, this is the format in which information must be published on the World Wide Web. It is the publishing standard for the World Wide Web portion of the Internet.

Telnet: Telnet is a program that allows someone to connect to an Internet server as if it were a mainframe computer and access information through mainframe-style character-only screens.

FTP: Stands for File Transfer Protocol, this is a program that allows users to download files from Internet servers.

Web Browser: is a computer program that runs on a user's machine and allows them to access content on the World Wide Web portion of the Internet. Browsers read HTML files. The leading browser program today is called Netscape Navigator. Microsoft's is called Internet Explorer and the city's current standard is Air Mosaic from Spry Communications.

Gopher: Gopher is another type of Internet service that is not commonly used by most Internet users. In fact the authors of this paper do not understand much about it despite our frequent use of the Internet.

TCP/IP: This is the protocol or lower level language of the Internet. Think about how English, German, French and other languages are different but all based on the Western (Roman?) alphabet. Similarly on the Internet, FTP, HTML, and Telnet are like languages(protocols) and TCP/IP is like the alphabet they are all built on.

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