As a multimedia designer, you find that clients are often unfamiliar
with technology. They know what they want, but they don't understand the technology
and the technical jargon that goes along with it.
It's part of your
job as a multimedia designer to explain to your clients what technology can
do for them. But you have to explain it in terms they understand.
Why
don't you try your hand at translating technical definitions into plain language?
Below are some definitions from the UC Berkeley Glossary of Internet
& Web Jargon. See if you can put them in your own words. Putting something
into your own words is the best way to ensure you really understand it.
HYPERTEXT:
On the World Wide Web, the feature, built into HTML, that allows a text area,
image, or other object to become a "link" (as if in a chain) that retrieves
another computer file (another web page, image, sound file or other document)
on the Internet. The range of possibilities is limited by the ability of the
computer retrieving the outside file to view, play or otherwise open the incoming
file. It needs to have software that can interact with the imported file.
Many software capabilities of this type are built into browsers or can be
added as "plug-ins."
SPIDERS: Computer robot programs, referred
to sometimes as "crawlers" or "knowledge-bots" or "knowbots" that are used
by search engines to roam the World Wide Web via the Internet, visit sites
and databases, and keep the search engine database of web pages up to date.
They obtain new pages, update known pages and delete obsolete ones. Their
findings are then integrated into the "home" database.
Most large
search engines operate several robots all the time. Even so, the web is so
enormous that it can take six months for spiders to cover it, resulting in
a certain degree of "out-of-datedness" (link rot) in all the search engines.
HTML:
Hypertext Markup Language. A standardized language of computer code, imbedded
in "source" documents behind all web documents, containing the textual content,
images, links to other documents (and possibly other applications such as
sound or motion), and formatting instructions for display on the screen. When
you view a web page, you are looking at the product of this code working behind
the scenes in conjunction with your browser. Browsers are programmed to interpret
HTML for display.
HTML often imbeds within it other programming languages
and applications such as SGML, XML, Javascript, CGI-script and more. It is
possible to deliver or access and execute virtually any program via the WWW.
You can see HTML by selecting the View pop-down menu tab, then "Document
Source."