Glossary of Technical Terms

Animated GIF: A file containing a series of GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) graphics that are displayed in rapid sequence in a Web browser, giving the appearance of a moving picture.

BBEdit: High-performance HTML & text editor for the Macintosh

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts, spacing, and aural cues) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). By separating the presentation style of documents from the content of documents, CSS simplifies Web authoring and site maintenance.

DocBook: A system for writing structured documents using SGML and XML. It is used mainly for documenting computer hardware and software, but is by no means limited to that use. The content models that make up DocBook are represented in a Document Type Definition (DTD) for use with XML and SGML.

Dreamweaver: A Macromedia software product that aids in the authoring of web pages and the management of web sites.

FileMaker: #1 selling relational database software. A relational database contains a collection of relational tables, views, and indexes.

FX: FX is a free open-source PHP class for accessing FileMaker data. For complete details about this class, please visit www.iviking.org.

HTML: The coding language used to create Hypertext documents for use on the World Wide Web.

Illustrator: Adobe vector based illustration software, commonly used when creating logos and other graphically based images.

Movable Type: Weblog publishing tool for individuals, organizations and web developers.

Photoshop: Adobe's digital imaging software. Used to manipulate or enhance digital photographs and to create original digital artwork.

PHP: PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. The code is embedded in HTML pages and processed on a web-server before sending the page to the client browser.

Smarty: Smarty is a PHP template engine used to facilitate the separation of application code from presentation. Typically, the application code contains the business logic of your application, written and maintained in PHP code. This code is maintained by programmers. The presentation is the way your content is presented to the end user, which is written and maintained in template files. The templates are maintained by template designers, or clients.

XHTML: A hybrid between HTML and XML. It is a way of making HTML documents compliant with the new XML standard.

XML: XML is the acronym for eXtensible Markup Language. XML is a programming language that enables designers to create their own tags to indicate specific information. It is the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web.

XSLT: XSL Transformations (XSLT) is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents. XSLT is designed for use as part of XSL, which is a stylesheet language for XML. An XSLT stylesheet can be used to transform an XML document into another form. This could be another XML document, or a document in a different format altogether, such as PDF, HTML, or even Braille. XSLT stylesheets work as a series of templates which produce the desired formatting effect each time a given element is encountered.