Multimedia Glossary: E

ECMAScript

ECMAScript 1.0 (ECMA-262) is the JavaScript standard of the European Computer Manufacturers Association.

Email

Email is short for electronic mail. Correspondence can be sent as electronic documents along networks just like paper correspondence is sent with postal services.

Email messages use a different network protocol (SMTP) than HTML documents (HTTP), which is why email is not typically sent from a browser, but from an email program such as Netscape Messenger or MS Outlook.
It is possible to port the SMTP message to HTML so that a web browser can be used for viewing email.

Element

An element marks a document content object so that a computer program can manipulate that kind of object effectively. As almost any object in the real world that is presented in a document may be regarded as an important element that needs to be marked as such in the document, many millions of elements are possible.
To make it easier to mark these elements, in HTML there are only about 80 pre-defined elements that a web author can use. Eelements are defined in DTDs. Most elements also have their own sets of attributes that may be used to describe some of its features or characteristics.
The set of elements in HTML are obviously limited. To address this, a related but much more powerful markup language, called XML, was developed by the W3C. In XML applications there may be millions of elements defined according to specific needs. The set of possible elements can be restricted by designing a specific XML-application in which only the relevant elements are defined.

In markup languages there is a specific syntax to be used for marking element content so that computers may know how to distinguish between different kinds of objects in a document. Elements have specific names in specific applications. For example, in HTML the paragraph object's element name is p, and is written between special symbols: <p>. These markup commands do not execute like programming commands, but indicate to a user agent (such as a browser) the structure of the marked document. A parser (which is a part of a browser) investigates the elements and their relationships and determines the structure of the document. The parser then passes that information along to a rendering engine which manipulates the content, typically using associated style sheets to determine how the content is to be rendered. The most typical manipulation is to display the content graphically on a computer screen, but it could also be manipulated to be rendered on other types of devices, such as speech synthesizers or tactile devices (eg Braille devices).

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ERCIM

European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics

The ERCIM is the European host of the W3C.

Experimental Model

MPEG-7

See XM

Extensible HyperText Markup Language

See XHTML

Extensible Markup Language

See XML

Extensible Stylesheet Language

See XSL

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