Microsoft’s internet information server, or IIS, is one of the most widely used commercial web server applications on the market. It runs on the Windows operating system and it incorporates all of the tools required by high-traffic commercial websites, such as security, extensions, logging, database interfaces and all of the necessary protocols.

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.

Short for internet service provider, an ISP owns and operates all of the equipment (telephony, digital cable, servers, etc.) that allow you to connect to the internet from your home or office.

Most ISPs sell access to their services for a small monthly fee, which you can access by connecting to your ISP’s computer network through a phone or cable line.

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.

Mbone is short for multicast backbone on the internet, and is an extension to the internet designed to support IP multicasting, or the transmission of data packets to multiple addresses. Most of this traffic is streaming audio and video which, like radio and TV broadcasts, is sent to many people at once. The Mbone was established in 1994 by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Mbone is likely to go obsolete with the adoption of IPv6 which supports multicasting by default.

Broadband is a general term used to describe any high-speed, high-bandwidth, “always on” internet connection.

Cable modems, DSL modems, satellite link-ups, and T1 lines are all broadband devices. Dial-up modems and other low-bandwidth devices are called “narrowband.”

NetCaster was Netscape Communicator’s push delivery system. It was basically a web environment that is always active and can update its onscreen appearance without going to a new URL or reloading. Like all push mechanisms, NetCaster doesn’t require the user to manually check for new content or sit through an update. It let the developer put new content in front of users instead of hoping they come looking for it.

The Netscape Communicator browser ceased development in 2002.

Short for Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD is a full-featured Unix operating system developed at the University of California at Berkeley.

Its main application today is as a robust and scalable web server, though different permutations have arisen over the years that expand upon the original code. Different flavors of BSD Unix include NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. BSD remains popular at universities and throughout the open source movement.

The path tool in Photoshop enables the selecting, identifying, and saving of parts of an image more precisely than the Lasso tool. Using the path tool, you can create an adjustable line connected by dots around a particular area. Once you’ve completed a circle, the path tool will select that area, allowing you to name and save it. The path can then be manipulated just as you’d manipulate a layer.

Caching (pronounced CASH-ing) is a technique computers use to save memory by storing frequently accessed files.

Web browsers have caches that keep recently downloaded web pages handy. Browser caches are typically kept on your local drive, and you can usually adjust the amount of memory or disk space allotted for the cache. The benefit of web caches is that you can access a cached page much more quickly than if you downloaded it from a distant server.