short for World Wide Web Consortium.

An international consortium of companies involved with the Internet and the Web.

The W3C was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the original architect of the World Wide Web.

The organization's purpose is to develop open standards so that the Web evolves in a single direction, rather than being splintered among competing factions.

A markup language used to structure text and multimedia documents, and to set up hypertext links between documents.

Used extensively on the World Wide Web.

Acronym: HyperText Transfer Protocol.

The underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web. HTTP defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands.

Acronym: Uniform Resource Locator.

A standard for dictating the location of files on the internet.

Acronym: Uniform Resource Identifier.

The addressing technology for identifying resources on the Internet or on private intranets.

URIs were originally defined as two types: Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), which are addresses with network locations, and Uniform Resource Names (URNs), which are persistent names that are address-independent.

Short for EXtensible HTML.

A markup language for Web pages from the W3C. XHTML combines HTML and XML into a single format (HTML 4.0 and XML 1.0). Like XML, XHTML can be extended with proprietary tags and (also like XML) must be coded more rigorously than HTML.

Pronounced, “at sign” or, simply, “at.”

This symbol is used in e-mail addressing to separate the user’s name from the user’s domain name, both of which are necessary in order to transmit e-mails. For example, the e-mail address “webmaster@webopedia.com” indicates that the user named webmaster receives e-mail "at," or "@," the webopedia.com domain.

A server is a computer system that provides services to other computing systems (called clients) over a network.

The term “server” can refer to hardware (as in the case of a Sun computer system) or software (such as an RDBMS server).

A network architecture in which each computer or process on the network is either a client or a server.

Servers are powerful computers or processes dedicated to managing disk drives (file servers), printers (print servers), or network traffic (network servers ).

Clients are PCs or workstations on which users run applications. Clients rely on servers for resources such as files, devices, and even processing power.

In computing, a protocol is a convention or standard that controls or enables the connection, communication, and data transfer between two computing endpoints.

In its simplest form, a protocol can be defined as the rules governing the syntax, semantics, and synchronization of communication. Protocols may be implemented by hardware, software, or a combination of the two. At the lowest level, a protocol defines the behavior of a hardware connection.