Can I catch a virus by looking at a web page?
NO, your computer can, of course, catch a virus if you download an executable program from an untrustworthy site and then, of your own free will, double-click on it in your file manager (or Mac desktop, or...). This is the same risk you run when downloading programs from bulletin board systems or via anonymous FTP.

What is a URL? (pronounced - you are ell)
uniform resource locator
universal resource locator
URLs are the Internet equivalent of addresses. How do they work? Like other types of addresses, they move from the general to the specific (from zip code to recipient, so to speak). Take this URL, for example: http://www.mammothweb.net

What are SGML and HTML?
Documents on the World Wide Web are written in a simple "markup language" called HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language. When you point your Web browser to a URL, the browser interprets the HTML commands embedded in the page and uses them to format the page's text and graphic elements. HTML commands cover many types of text formatting (bold and italic text, lists, headline fonts in various sizes, and so on), and also have the ability to include graphics and other nontext elements.

How can I search through ALL web sites?
Several people have written robots which create indexes of web sites -- including sites which have not arranged to be mentioned in the newspapers and catalogs above.

Here are a few such automatic indexes you can search: Yahoo, Hotbot, Lycos, NBCI, Webcrawler, to name just a few.

What is JavaScript?
JavaScript is a platform-independent, event-driven, interpreted programming language developed by Netscape Communications Corp. and Sun Microsystems. Originally called LiveScript (and still called LiveWireTM by Netscape in its compiled, server-side incarnation), JavaScript is affiliated with Sun's object-oriented programming language JavaTM primarily as a marketing convenience. They interoperate well but are technically, functionally and behaviorally very different.

JavaScript is useful for adding interactivity to the World Wide Web because scripts can be embedded in HTML files (i.e., web pages) simply by enclosing code in a <SCRIPT> </SCRIPT> tag pair. All modern browsers can interpret JavaScript -- albeit with some irritating caveats. (More about them below.)

In practice, JavaScript is a fairly universal extension to HTML that can enhance the user experience through event handling and client-side execution, while extending a web developer's control over the client's browser. And that's worth a FAQ.

What is CSS?
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a simple styling language which allows attaching style to HTML elements. Every element type as well as every occurance of a specific element within that type can be declared an unique style, e.g. margins, positioning, color or size.

What is SMTP? (simple mail transfer protocol)

When you're exchanging electronic mail on the Internet, SMTP is what keeps the process orderly. It's a protocol that regulates what goes on between the mail servers.

What is an Intranet?
A play on the word Internet, an intranet is a restricted-access network that works like the Web, but isn't on it. Usually owned and managed by a corporation, an intranet enables a company to share its resources with its employees without confidential information being made available to everyone with Internet access.

What is an Extranet?
Companies often use extranets to provide nonpublic information to a select group of people, such as business partners or customers. So while an extranet may look like an ordinary Web site, you have to enter a password or use digital encryption to access it. For example, Federal Express's customers can track packages on the company's extranet by simply entering a tracking number. And Bank of America's extranet lets users transfer funds or look up account balances online. Using an extranet can help companies save money by allowing customers to find information themselves, without having to call and talk to a person.

What is an ISP? (Internet service provider)
Once upon a time, you could only connect to the Internet if you belonged to a major university or had a note from the Pentagon. Not anymore: ISPs have arrived to act as your (ideally) user-friendly front end to all that the Internet offers. Most ISPs have a network of servers (mail, news, Web, and the like), routers, and modems attached to a permanent, high-speed Internet "backbone" connection. Subscribers can then dial into the local network to gain Internet access--without having to maintain servers, file for domain names, or learn Unix.

What is an applet?
Applet is a diminutive form of app (application), and it refers to simple, single-function programs that often ship with a larger product. Programs such as Windows' Calculator, File Manager, and Notepad are examples of applets.

What is bandwidth?
In a general sense, this term describes information-carrying capacity. It can apply to telephone or network wiring as well as system buses, radio frequency signals, and monitors. On a more human level, the term can describe a person's capacity for dealing with multiple projects ("I'd like to update this database, but I don't have the bandwidth.").

Bandwidth is most accurately measured in cycles per second, or hertz (Hz), which is the difference between the lowest and highest frequencies transmitted. But it's also common to use bits or bytes per second instead.

What is a browser?
If you can read this, it's highly likely that you're using a Web browser. In brief, a browser is your interface to the World Wide Web; it interprets hypertext links and lets you view sites and navigate from one Internet node to another. Among the companies that produce browsers are NCSA Mosaic, Netscape, and Microsoft, as well as commercial services like CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online.

What is cache?
Caches come in many types, but they all work the same way: they store information where you can get to it fast. A Web browser cache stores the pages, graphics, sounds, and URLs of online places you visit on your hard drive; that way, when you go back to the page, everything doesn't have to be downloaded all over again. Since disk access is much faster than Internet access, this speeds things up. Of course, disk access is slower than RAM access, so there's also disk caching, which stores information you might need from your hard disk in faster RAM.

What is CGI? (common gateway interface)
The CGI standard lays down the rules for running external programs in a Web HTTP server. External programs are called gateways because they open up an outside world of information to the server.

What is a cookie?
According to Netscape, cookies are a "general mechanism which server side connections can use to both store and retrieve information on the client side of the connection." In English, that means cookies are small data files written to your hard drive by some Web sites when you view them in your browser. These data files contain information the site can use to track such things as passwords, lists of pages you've visited, and the date when you last looked at a certain page.

What is a database?
A database can be as simple as a shopping list or as complex as a collection of thousands of sounds, graphics, and related text files. Database software is designed to help users organize such information. While early "flat" databases were limited to simple, searchable rows and columns, modern relational databases allow users to access and reorganize data in a variety of ways. Even more advanced databases let users store and retrieve all kinds of nonstandard data, from sound clips to video.

What is a domain name?
Looking for a domain name? You'll find it to the right of the @ sign in an email address, or about ten characters into a URL. Desert Web Design's domain name is desertwebdesign.com. Domain names are issued by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and they come with different extensions based on whether the domain belongs to a commerical enterprise (.com), an educational establishment (.edu), a government body (.gov), the military (.mil), a network (.net), or a nonprofit organization (.org).

What is DSL? (digital subscriber line)
Digital subscriber lines carry data at high speeds over standard copper telephone wires. With DSL, data can be delivered at a rate of 1.5 mbps (around 30 times faster than through a 56-kbps modem). Also, DSL users can receive voice and data simultaneously, so small offices can leave computers plugged into the Net without interrupting phone connections. Currently, DSL is expensive because specialized equipment--a splitter--needs to be installed at the subscriber's location. DSL Lite, the consumer-ready version of DSL, requires no such splitter, and promises comparable access speeds at a cheaper rate. xDSL is the collective term for different variations of DSL, such as ADSL and HDSL.

What is FTP? (file transfer protocol)
This Internet protocol is used to copy files between computers--usually a client and an archive site. It's old-fashioned, it's a bit on the slow side, it doesn't support compression, and it uses cryptic Unix command parameters. But the good news is that you can download shareware or freeware apps that shield you from the complexities of Unix, and you can connect to FTP sites using a Web browser.

What is an OS? (operating system)
A computer by itself is essentially dumb bits of wire and silicon. An operating system knows how to talk to this hardware and can manage a computer's functions, such as allocating memory, scheduling tasks, accessing disk drives, and supplying a user interface. Without an operating system, software developers would have to write programs that directly accessed hardware--essentially reinventing the wheel with every new program. With an operating system, such as Windows NT or Mac OS 8, developers can write to a common set of programming interfaces called APIs and let the operating system do the dirty work of talking to the hardware.

What does POP mean? (Post Office Protocol)
The current champ in Internet email mailbox access standards, but its limitations--basically, you connect to a server and download all your messages, which are then deleted from the server--discourage flexibility. Of course, some clients let you leave all messages on the server, and/or refuse to download messages above a certain size. Still, as messages become longer--with multimedia (such as sound or video) objects and the likes--we'll want some flexibility in what we retrieve and when we retrieve it. That's where IMAP comes in. The current version of POP is POP3.

What is SSL? (Secure Sockets Layer)
SSL is a transaction security standard developed by Netscape Communications to enable commercial transactions to take place over the otherwise notoriously nonsecure Internet. It's one of a few competing security standards.

What is TCP/IP? (transmission control protocol/Internet protocol)
These two protocols were developed by the U.S. military to allow computers to talk to each other over long distance networks. IP is responsible for moving packets of data between nodes. TCP is responsible for verifying delivery from client to server. TCP/IP forms the basis of the Internet, and is built into every common modern operating system (including all flavors of Unix, the Mac OS, and the latest versions of Windows).

What is Telnet?
Telnet is an application that lets you log on to a Unix computer. Provided you have an account on that Telnet server, you can then use its resources. A drawback of Telnet is that it's character-based, so you need to speak Unix to the other computer.

*These facts were brought to you by many resources but we would like to thank cnet.com for their contribution