Net Lingo

A whole new vernacular is rising up around Web operations, spawning such jargon as stickiness, a spider-inspired term that describes how long a visitor spends on your Web site. The stickier your site, the longer people stay. Trendy slang aside, there is some net lingo that all federal managers should know.

For example, people have begun using the terms "Internet" and "World Wide Web" interchangeably. However, there are important differences. The Internet is a worldwide network of computers upon which a variety of communications methods reside--electronic mail, the World Wide Web and some lesser known methods such as newsgroups and file transfer protocol. The Web is essentially a vast library on the Internet made up of documents in a common format known as Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. In HTML, the documents contain links to each other and can be read by a software program called a "browser." The most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

When webmasters are asked how many people go to their sites, they typically respond with the number of "hits." Keep in mind that hits are not people. A hit, also called a "page view," happens every time a user downloads a document from a Web site. If a person downloads five documents from a site, that counts as five hits. A million people each downloading five documents will count as 5 million hits.

A Web address, also called a URL ("uniform resource locator"), can tell you much about a site you're visiting. Let's take a look at www.whitehouse.gov. The www at the beginning of the address is a customary opening for an address that tells people they are accessing a Web site. It is not a required part of an address. Whitehouse.gov is the domain of an address, which identifies the computer or network a Web site is stored on. Official government domains end in ".gov," and military domains end in ".mil." Domains for government sites are issued by the General Services Administration. For military sites, domains are issued by the Defense Information Systems Agency. Commercial sites are assigned domains ending in ".com," universities get ".edu," and nonprofit organizations get ".org."