Technology Tools and Computer Applications / Web Design

Web Design - Vocabulary

• ACTA - Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement - an agreement among several countries to set up a governing organization to set rules/enforce laws about counterfeit goods. This means physical goods such as clothes, medicine, and computers but also intangible goods such as digital work and copyright infringement. - On October 1, 2011 these countries signed the agreement: United States, Australia, Canada, Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Morocco, and Singapore. In addition the European Union, Mexico, and Switzerland attended the ceremony and are preparing to sign the agreement soon.

• Anti Aliasing - a software technique to remove "jaggies" - sharp edges from the pixels so the image looks smoother on monitor

• Attribute - these are words added to the tag command in order to modify it a bit. For instance, to change the height of a particular image we added the height="200" attribute to our code.

• AUP: Acceptable Use Policy - an organization's rules for using technology resources - this is usually an agreement that is signed by the employee or user (in this case: you)

• Blending Options - in Photoshop - editing individual layers to create textures, shading and highlighting. (We used this when creating metallic and stylized text)

• Brackets - < and >, these enclose all tags in html and are used to let the browser know that a tag is being read, so a new paragraph tag looks like <P> and an ending paragraph tag looks like </p>

• Browser - an application program that lets you look at information on the world wide web (examples: Internet Explorer, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome)

• <br> tag - this forces a single line break. It does not require an ending tag.

• Deprecate - an html element or attribute is one that has been outdated. They may become obsolete in the future, but browsers should continue to support deprecated elements for backward compatibility.

• Filter – a built in tool that produces a special effect. These can range from something as simple as a blurred or softened image to wild, psychedelic patterns, distortions, and artistic effects.

• GIF - Graphics Interchange Format - an image file with limited color (256) - best for images such as clipart

• HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language - the programming language used to create web pages

• Hyperlink - when clicked on the user will be taken to a website, or another place within the current page. Usually these are underlined and have a different color than the rest of the page. When coding a hyperlink you will use the anchor tags: <a> </a>

• JPEG or JPG: Joint Photographic Experts Group - an image file with high quality color and resolution - often used for photographs

• Optimizing - to reduce a photo or a graphic in visual and file size - web images do not need the depth or complexity of images that are going to be printed - in order to have them load quicker a good designer chooses the smallest file size with the best appearance for a web page

• Pixel: PIX (picture) Element - the smallest unit on a display screen or in a digital image

• PIPA - Protect IP Act - a proposed law with the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to "rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods", especially those registered outside the U.S. - It is similar to the SOPA Act

• PNG - Portable Network Graphic - this was developed as an alternative to the gif format (mostly due to legal issues)

• PSD - this is the native format for photoshop. It saves all the data in the photoshop file. It can be quite large including all layers, channels, effects and resolution.

• Raster Images – images are made up of pixels and have a fixed resolution. Sometimes also called "pixel-based images".

• RGB -The combination of red, green and blue colors for display on electronic devices

• Hexadecimal - a base 16 number system - color codes for html are expressed in hex code

• Layers -think of these as clear sheets; each containing part of an image- you can move layers around, and work on them individually

• SOPA - Stop Online Piracy Act - The “spirit” of the bill is listed as: ”To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes. The act gives the government the right, without repercussion, to censor any site in the U.S or Internationally based solely on their investigation and the information provided by outside parties. This means YouTube is at risk, among several other sites...

• Tag - these are letters that have special meaning in html. They tell the browser what to do. For example: p (means paragraph), h1 (means heading one) - adding a / tells the browser to end that particular command </p> </h1>

• target="_blank" attribute - used when creating a hyperlink - it allows you to open the linked page in a new window

• Transform - the command used in photoshop when you want to scale (change the size) or rotate a selection (we used this on the rooster, remember?)

• Uninvited Guest - programs that just pop-up and ask you to reply to a dialog box - usually to try and get you to install a program or go to a dangerous site