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hacker
There are two competing definitions of "hacker"
floating around. The first is the computer user
who knows the technology backwards and forwards,
who can see new ways around tough problems, and
who creates amazing innovations. These hackers are
like the teenage girl in Jurassic Park, who -- just
as the velociraptor is about to break into the room
and have her and several other humans for dinner
-- sees a workstation and says, to the giggles of
UNIX programmers worldwide,
"Hey, this is UNIX! I know this!" She
then quickly re-engages the bursting door's security
system. (Could the fact that the whole place collapsed
into chaos have anything to do with the fact that
it was being run off a UNIX box?) The other definition
is the equally knowledgeable person who uses his
expertise to break into elaborate systems for the
pride and sheer anarchy of it. Top
helper
app
Your browser can display a wide range of goodies:
GIFs, JPEGs, text, even some sound and video.
However, multitalented as your browser is, sometimes
it needs a little help. Thankfully there's an
array of applications out there designed to do
just that. They're called, logically enough, "helper-apps."
The term is used to describe any program that's
not a browser per se, but which lets you make
use of files that your browser doesn't recognize
on its own (such as animation, multimedia, or
other specialized resources). When your browser
runs across a file it can't understand, it consults
its list of helper-apps, and decides which application
it needs to use the file. If it can't find one,
it will ask you to either pick an application
or specify where to save the file on your hard
disk. Helper-apps are very similar to plug-ins.
Plug-ins help you deal with stange file types
as well, except plug-ins work within your
browser, while helper-apps work independently
of your browser. That means plug-ins display the
information directly in your browser window, while
helper-apps make their own window.
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hits
Web keepers have a difficult time counting
how many people come to visit their Web pages
(and an even tougher time figuring out who those
people are). One of the earliest ways of estimating
how much "traffic" a site was getting
was to count the number of "hits" it
got. A hit is a request to the Web server to send
along a file -- for instance, when you came to
this page the server got one hit requesting all
this text, and a second hit asking for the graphics
file for our logo (up top). Seems like a good
way to tell how many people are asking for pages
from a Web site, doesn't it? Problem is, it's
not -- not only do lots of graphics on a page
make counts artifically high, but some
of the tricks your computer does to speed things
up (like caching) will
make counts artificially low. You'll still
hear Web keepers talk about how many hits their
sites get per week (or per month or per day),
but don't attach too much importance to what they're
saying.
Top
HTML
HTML is the language used to create hypertext,
which means it's the foundation of the Web as
we know it. In fact, HTML was used to create every
single page you've ever visited on the Web (including
this one). HTML uses a series of commands written
in ascii text to
tell your browser how to display each page, whether
it means using a different size, or style
or to display graphics, and create links.
If you want to see what the HTML code looks like
for whatever page you're on, just use the "View
Document Source" command under the "View"
menu in your browser. HTML stands for Hypertext
Markup Language
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