A bridge (not to be confused with a router) is a data network device used to connect two network segments of different protocols.

For example, if you want computers on a TCP/IP network to talk to computers on a token ring network, you need a bridge to connect the two segments.

Event handlers are functions that handle client-side events.

Commonly used JavaScript event handlers include onClick, onMouseOver, and onLoad. When one of these events occurs – the user clicks on a link, for example – the event handler for that event will be executed.

Meta information means “information about information.”

<META HTTP-EQUIV="name" CONTENT="content">

<META NAME="name" CONTENT="content">

HTTP-EQUIV

HTTP

NAME

META NAME

Practical extraction and reporting language, or Perl, is a scripting language first created by Larry Wall to be used as duct tape for programming with the Unix operating system. Due to its immense power for handling piles of text and, consequently, as a common gateway interface (CGI) scripting language, Perl became very popular among server-side scripters. Perl has a large community of contributing programmers and, what’s more, costs nothing and is free to redistribute. These circumstances have helped Perl evolve from a scripting language used to generate server stats into a language many use for database administration. All along Perl has maintained its zaniness. Most Perl documentation reads as though written by early vaudeville comedians.

A popular and widely-used flavor of Unix, Solaris (formerly named SunOS) is used for large-scale enterprise networks with tens of thousands of active nodes. Solaris is capable of distributed computing (using multiple computers’ processors to complete a single task) and symmetrical multi-processing (running two or more processors in one computer). The OS ships on Sun’s Sparc workstations along with graphical interfaces to increase user-friendliness.

CMYK stands for cyan magenta yellow and blacK and is a color system used in the offset printing of full-color documents.

Offset uses cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks and is often referred to as “four-color” printing. Monitors use red, green, and blue light instead, so they display images using a different color system called RGB. One of the great problems of the digital age has been matching colors between these two systems; i.e., taking a digital RGB image and making it look the same in print using CMYK. These problems are addressed by applications such as the Pantone Matching System.

If anyone who isn’t a network engineer mentions “hits” to you, they’re probably trying to pull the cyberwool over your eyes. Hits are the individual requests a server answers in order to render a single web page completely. The page document itself, the various images on the page, any other media files embedded there – each of these items represents a separate hit. In other words, the more GIFs used in a page, the higher the hit count – so while hits may be a good indication of poor page design, they won’t tell you much about traffic.

Multimedia describes the ability of a computer to present and combine text, graphics, video, animation, and sound.

Before the personal computer boom, the word multimedia had a much simpler connotation – paper, glass, and acrylic on canvas was (and is) multimedia. The birth of the web led to a great potential for multimedia, because of the ability of networked computers to deliver this information to all users and to allow everyone to join in the world of multimedia publishing.

Raster graphics are bitmap images, which means they’re basically grids of individually defined pixels (as opposed to vector graphics, which produce images using mathematically generated points and lines). The dominant web graphics formats, GIF and JPEG, are raster graphics. Raster is often used with complex images, such as photographs.

Unix, along with Linux and Windows, is one of the most widely-used and oldest operating systems in the world. Since it operates on every hardware platform imaginable, Unix is used to running just about any type of software application you can think of. Banking applications, web servers, videogames and research stations are just a few possible uses for this diverse OS. Since Unix code was originally distributed freely among universities, government institutions and research laboratories, Unix is considered to be the first open-source operating system. Some open-source permutations of Unix are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, and Linux. Some commercial distributions of Unix are SCO, Solaris, and AIX.