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Some companies have a dozen different titles for designers with slightly different jobs; other companies slap one title on everybody, and often enough the title makes little intuitive sense. Orange you Grey we’ve provided this little chapter to help you navigate the twin minefields of Internet buzzwords and ever-changing job titles? You bet you are. (Our apologies to Grey Advertising, consultants everywhere, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, whom we haven’t offended but just felt like mentioning because it’s a good cause. Besides, if we don’t mention it here, our cats will claw our eyes out—and they can do it.)

WEB LINGO

Extranet

An extranet is a private network of computers that is created by connecting two or more intranets or by exposing an intranet to specific external users and no one else. Business-to-business collaboration often uses extranets.

In English: Extranets are websites that allow Company A to interact with Company B, and Special Customer C to interact with either or both—pretty kinky stuff. As a web designer, you may never be called upon to design an extranet. (If you are, it’s the same thing as designing a website. We’re sorry to bore you with these tedious distinctions, but that’s our job in a section like this. We hear the American Movie Classics cable network is hosting an Alfred Hitchcock retrospective. Maybe you should go watch it until this chapter blows over.)

On the other hand, the Business-to-Business (B2B) category is one of the largest growth areas of the Web, so you may find yourself stuck, er, asked to design extranet sites anyway.

Websites are websites whether they’re designed for the general public or for private businesses. However, because extranets are business-oriented, they tend to be more like software and less like magazines or television. In other words, the challenges are closer to industrial design and technical design and further from the consumer-oriented design many of us are used

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to. In still other words, this type of design work is not for everybody, though some designers adore and excel at it. (Excel is a trademark of Microsoft, and even though we didn’t use it in that context in the preceding sentence, their lawyers read everything.)

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is an application of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and is used to construct hypertext documents (web pages).

In English: HTML is to web pages what PostScript is to print. But while PostScript is a complex programming language, best handled behind the scenes by software such as Illustrator and Quark XPress, HTML is a simple markup language best written by human beings. HTML breaks content down into structural components, much as an outline does.

The simplicity of HTML makes it easy to learn, but that simplicity also can be limiting. Soon, many sites will be built with more advanced tools, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML). You need not concern yourself with that now. Later on in this book we will show you what HTML is, how to use it correctly, and how to employ it creatively. See Chapter 8, “HTML: The Building Blocks of Life Itself.”

Hypertext, hyperlinks, and links

For additional information, refer to the section titled, “Website” later in this chapter.

Internet

The Internet is a worldwide networking infrastructure that connects all variety of computers together. These connections are made via Internet protocols including (surprise, surprise) Internet Protocol (IP), Transport Control Protocol (TCP), and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). IP is used for addresses, TCP is used to manage sockets (and hence the Web), and UDP is used to manage Domain Name Servers (DNSs). See Chapter 4, “How This Web Thing Got Started,” for further explanation.

126 WHO: The Obligatory Glossary: Web Lingo

In English: The Internet is to the Web as cable networks are to television or as phone cables and switching stations are to your Uncle Marvin, who always phones while you’re away on vacation and then resents you for not returning his call the very next day. The Internet is a combination of hardware (computers linked together) and software (languages and protocols that make the whole thing work).

As a web designer, all you need to keep in mind is that you’re not only communicating with readers and viewers (“users” if you must), you’re also creating work that must fit into formats appropriate to Internet technology. In other words, it’s not your job to manage networks (for instance) as long as you understand their implications for your work—such as bandwidth and cross-platform issues. See Chapter 2, “Designing for the Medium.”

Intranet

An intranet is an internal or private networking infrastructure that uses Internet technologies and tools. Unlike what occurs on the Internet, only computers on the private physical network can access an intranet.

In English: As a web designer, in addition to creating sites for the public, you also might be called upon to create intranet sites, which are nothing more than websites for private companies. For instance, AT&T not only has websites for the public, it also has thousands of private intranet sites where its employees can communicate with each other, schedule appointments, keep track of company policies, and so on.

One other difference worth noting is that when you’re designing an Internet site, it has to be usable by anyone in the world—Netscape, Opera, IE, and iCab users; 6.0 browser users as well as 2.0 browser users; the blind and the not-blind; WebTV users and AOL users alike. You get the picture. On an intranet site, by contrast, all visitors may be using the same web browser and computing platform, which can simplify some of your design choices.

Of course, even in such circumstances, it is best to design with open standards so that your client will not be locked into restrictive choices. For instance, if you had designed an intranet for a network of Netscape 4 users

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in 1998, you might have built the entire site using Netscape’s proprietary LAYERS technology. But with Navigator 6, Netscape stopped supporting LAYERS in favor of W3C standards. Had you designed specifically for Netscape’s previous browser, your site would not work when the client upgraded browsers. Clients dislike that sort of thing, even when they are the ones who insisted on using a specific technology. Proceed with caution.

Additionally, if all the site’s users are connected via a local network, you can make bold use of bandwidth-intensive technologies such as streaming video. When designing for the Web, you need to worry about bandwidth. Full-screen video is out; smaller video images and heavily compressed audio might be okay. For more on this fascinating topic, see Dave Linabury’s

“The Ins and Outs of Intranets” at www.alistapart.com/stories/inout/.

JavaScript, ECMAScript, CSS, XML, XHTML, DOM

In English: Additional languages of the Web.

Briefly: JavaScript is a programming language that enables designers or developers to build dynamic interactivity into their sites, further separating the Web from print. ECMAScript is a standardized version of JavaScript. See Chapter 11, “The Joy of JavaScript,” for more particulars on this topic.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a standard that enables designers to control online layout and typography. Like HTML, its basics are extremely easy to learn, though its subtleties elude many designers (as well as many browsers). See Chapter 10, “Style Sheets for Designers.”

XML is a simplified version of SGML, designed for use on the Net. As of this writing, it is most often used to deliver database-independent query results between incompatible software applications. It is not yet universally supported in web browsers, though XML 1 is fully supported in Netscape 6, and much of it is supported in IE5 and Opera 5. As a web designer, at least for the next few years, you will hear about and see XML, but you will not be called upon to create it—unless you begin marking up your web pages in

Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML).