Action is a Form attribute that communicates with the common gateway interface (CGI) program to process.
For example, if you entered “bananas” to the following form:
<form action="../processor.cgi">
Please process this:
<input name=food><br>
<input type=submit>
</form>
The HTML form would send the input “bananas” to the cgi script. To the cgi script, the action would look like: ../processor.cgi?food=bananas
Apache is a freely available, and highly popular, open-source web server.
Originally, Apache was designed for Unix. Now versions are available for most operating systems including Windows, OSX and Linux. There are also numerous add-ons and tailored versions of the server using the Apache module API. The name Apache comes from its origins as a series of “patch files.”
Read Webmonkey’s Apache for Beginners article for more details about Apache.
Information and downloads can be found at the Apache Software Foundation website.
Apache is a freely available, and highly popular, open-source web server.
Originally, Apache was designed for Unix. Now versions are available for most operating systems including Windows, OSX and Linux. There are also numerous add-ons and tailored versions of the server using the Apache module API. The name Apache comes from its origins as a series of “patch files.”
Read Webmonkey’s Apache for Beginners article for more details about Apache.
Information and downloads can be found at the Apache Software Foundation website.
The application program interface (API) is a set of building blocks for programmers.
APIs are made up of routines, protocols, and tools. Most operating environments provide an API so that programmers can write applications consistent with that environment. For example, developing software using the Windows API ensures that your user interface will be consistent with other Windows applications, making it easier for users to learn your new programs.
Web APIs provide simple ways to interact with websites. Using an API, you can extract public data from sites like del.icio.us, Flickr and Digg to create mashups, reuse data or just about anything else you can imagine.
APIs are also useful for extracting your own private data from a web service so that you can back it up elsewhere or display it on another site.
When talking about APIs you’ll here the following terms quite a bit.
In computer science, architecture means the conceptual arrangement of a system’s components.
Taking the analogy of a physical building, if a website’s individual pages are rooms, its architecture is the hypertextual relationship between the rooms within the structure.
Banners are a basic unit of advertising on the web.
They were pioneered by GNN and HotWired back in the frontier days of 1994 and are now nearly ubiquitous, appearing in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and locations. You can probably see one right now at the top of the page.
Setting a dHTML element’s behavior attribute allows you to customize the element.
Microsoft implemented the behavior attribute of Cascading Style Sheets in a way that enabled object-oriented programming to enter the world of web authoring. By encapsulating dHTML in an external object, the properties and methods of that object can be used. A web page can then use these objects with the behavior attribute. This means, for example, that a web author no longer had to perform an explicit browser detection.
A bitmap is a mapped array of pixels that can be saved as a file.
Both JPEG and GIF are bitmap graphic formats. Currently, the only other way to store an image is as a vector graphic. You can’t easily scale bitmap images, but you can control every single pixel and thus achieve many effects impossible in vector graphics. Conversely, vector formats offer advantages of scalability and lower bandwidth requirements. When you compress a bitmapped image, you suck out some of the visual information.
To bypass this, the portable network graphics format (or PNG, pronounced “ping”) was designed to store a single bitmap image for transmittal over computer networks without losing this data.
Bit depth describes the file size of an image by orders of magnitude.
When wrangling with file size versus image quality, it’s often important to minimize the bit depth of an image while maximizing the number of colors. To calculate the maximum number of colors for an image of a particular bit depth, remember that the number of colors is equal to two to the power of what the bit depth is. For example, a GIF can support up to eight bits per pixel, and therefore can have as a many as 256 colors, since two to the power of eight equals 256.
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