Multimedia Glossary

WAF: Wireless Application Forum; WAF was founded in 1995 by Unwired Planet and joined by Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola to enable a pseudo web-experience for cell phones.; The main components of its technology are WAP and WML.

wais: Wide Area Information Services; This method is used for searching databases of documents and allows retrieving and viewing of documents from the databases.

WAP: Wireless Application Protocol; WAP is an effort of WAF that mimics the web protocols TCP/IP and HTTP. WAP cannot operate directly on those protocols but linked with a gateway.; WAP has been criticized as a temporary solution. For a negative technical overview of WAP, see Rohit Kohare's W* Effect Considered Harmful (9 April 1999) (http://www.4k-associates.com/IEEE-L7-WAP-BIG.html). For usability problems, see Jakob Nielsen's Alert Box (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001210.html) or Report (http://www.nngroup.com/reports/wap/)

.WAV: A wave file (*.WAV) is a compressed waveform file used for transporting sound files through The Internet. Waveform is a Microsoft Windows format, but such a file can be played back on other platforms (Such as Macs) with the necessary player software.

Web Address: A web address may consist of a unique domain name or of a name that is part of a subdirectory of a domain name. Every Web Page has its unique Web Address, technically known as a URI.; Example of a Domain Name web address:
http://www.howdy.com; Example of a Name that is a subdirectory of a domain name:
http://www.howdy.com/public/joe_doe/index.html
This web address is the address and path of the Web Page called index.html.

Web Page: A web page is an HTML document, usually saved as an HTML file, although it may also be a temporarily created document that ceases to exist the moment the user agent or server session is closed. A web page may be the result from the input of many different files. Each object (ie image, video clip, sound clip, data or document) that is inserted into the web page most probably consists of a separate file. The web page or document thus serves as a container for all these different files. The size of a Web Page can be anything from a blank displayed page, to theoretically a document that would consist of many hundreds of printed pages. In practice it is unlikely that you will find such large web pages as they will take too long to load.; Web Page is a confusing name as it is not related at all to printed pages. A single web page may need many different paper sheets when printed. For the typical computer Web browser, a web page is the file(s) or document that loads from a unique address (URI). Every Web Page has its unique address, even though that address may only exist for the session that the document is used.; Cell phones and similar small devices cannot render traditional web pages. For such devices a traditional web pages is broken up into a deck of cards, where the "deck" would be the traditional web page, and the "cards" the small pieces of information making up the deck. This is technically achieved with c-HTML (Compact HTML), or alternatively with WML.

Web Site: A Web Site is a collection of Web Pages or documents. The phrase is use indiscriminately for a few files residing in a subdirectory under some or other domain name, or more appropriately for all the documents that fall under a specific domain name.; Users often call any URI their web site. For example, some call all the files in their subdirectory their web site:
http://www/wacko.org/~users/freud_junior/my_first_file.htm In other words, other files in the subdirectory freud_junior would be regarded as Freud's web site.; More appropriately a Web Site is linked to a domain name such as
http://www.wacko.org

WML: Wireless Markup Language; WML 1.1 16 June 1999. WML is not a W3C effort, but one by the WAF (Wireless Application Forum).; WML has the same aims as c-HTML, but does not adhere to several web standards. It should be regarded as a temporary solution until c-HTML and XHTML are implemented. WML runs on top of WAP.

WWW: World Wide Web; The World Wide Web was the name used by Time Berners-Lee for a project he envisaged in 1989 to make possible a universal document exchange by means of computer networks, particularly the Internet. The protocol he wrote for transporting documents is HTTP, and the Domain Name System uses WWW as the service name.; Originally only text documents (saved as HTML files) were accessed with browsers that could receive and display WWW documents. Nowadays a browser seemlessly integrates other services (such as mail, graphics, animation, scripts, video and music), and devices other than PCs can be used to access web documents.

W3C: World Wide Web Consortium; The W3C is an organization that releases "standards" (called "Recommendations") for the Web. The HTML 4 Recommendations, among others, was released by the W3C.; The World Wide Web Consortium is headed by the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee. Based at MIT the W3C is a joint effort of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, originally INRIA (France, Europe), but now ERCIM, and Keio University (Japan) to set standards for the Web.; For more information on the W3C, contact their web site http://www.w3c.org/.; Strictly speaking the W3C cannot write standards. Their "standards" are recommendations. Some of their recommendations have become standards, ratified by the ISO. In 1995 the IETF submitted HTML 2.0 as an Internet Draft

Multimedia Glossary: W