4th Dimension Development

The fourth dimension in physics and math is time.

Web accessibility refers to the practice of making Web pages accessible to people using a wide range of user agent devices, not just standard web browsers. This is especially important for people with disabilities which require such devices to access the Web.

The disabilities that Web accessibility is concerned with encompass users who are:

• Blind or visually impaired, e.g. various common types of poor eyesight, various types of color blindness
• Motor impaired, e.g. Parkinson's Disease, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, stroke
• Cognitively impaired, i.e. poor short-term memory (as commonly caused by senile dementia), dyslexia
• Hearing impaired or deaf
• Non-native speakers of the website's language(s) (including users of sign languages)

Ajax, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.

An example is the Google Maps feature.

Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's server-side technology for dynamically-generated web pages that is marketed as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS).

Cascading Style Sheets are used by both the authors and readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentational characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content. CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on braille-based, tactile devices. Similarly, identical HTML or XML markup can be displayed in a variety of styles, 'brands', liveries or color schemes by using different CSS.

Dynamic HTML or DHTML is a method of creating interactive web sites by using a combination of static markup language (such as HTML), a client-side scripting language (such as JavaScript), the presentation definition language (e.g. Cascading Style Sheets [CSS]), and the Document Object Model. Some disadvantages of DHTML are that it is difficult to develop and debug due to varying degrees of support among web browsers of the aforementioned technologies and that the variety of screen sizes means the end look can only be fine-tuned on a limited number of browser and screen-size combinations. Development for recent browsers, such as Internet Explorer 5.0+, Netscape 6.0+, and Opera 7.0+, is aided by a shared Document Object Model.

Electronic commerce, EC, e-commerce or ecommerce consists primarily of the distributing, buying, selling, marketing, and servicing of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The information technology industry might see it as an electronic business application aimed at commercial transactions. It can involve electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, e-marketing, online marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), automated inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. It typically uses electronic communications technology such as the Internet, extranets, e-mail, e-books, databases, and mobile phones.

According to Forrester Research (as cited in Kessler, 2003), electronic commerce generated sales worth US $12.2 billion in 2003.

An extranet is a private internet over the Internet.

An extranet is a private network that uses Internet protocols, network connectivity, and possibly the public telecommunication system to securely share part of a business's information or operations with suppliers, vendors, partners, customers or other businesses. An extranet can be viewed as part of a company's Intranet that is extended to users outside the company (eg: normally over the Internet). It has also been described as a “state of mind” in which the Internet is perceived as a way to do business with other companies as well as to sell products to customers.

Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash), or simply Flash, refers to both the Adobe Flash Player and to a multimedia authoring program used to create content for the Adobe Engagement Platform (such as web applications, games and movies). The Flash Player, developed and distributed by Adobe Systems (which bought Macromedia), is a client application available in most dominant web browsers. It features support for vector and raster graphics, a scripting language called ActionScript and bidirectional streaming of audio and video.

Flash is capable of adding many features to a website, some are:

• Animated page elements
• Rich internet applications
• Video & multimedia capabilities
• Database graphic interfaces

Information Architecture (often abbreviated “I.A.”) is the practice of structuring information (knowledge or data) for a purpose. These are often structured according to their context in user interactions or larger databases. The term is most commonly applied to Web development

• The structural design of shared information environments.
• The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability.
• An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

An intranet is a private version of the Internet such as an internal website. More advanced intranets allow companies to provide a web interface with legacy data and information systems.

Increasingly, intranets are being used to deliver tools and applications, eg: collaboration (to facilitate working in groups and for teleconferences) or sophisticated corporate directories, sales and CRM tools, project management, etc, to advance productivity.

Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. Java applications are, in the official implementation, compiled to bytecode, which is compiled to native machine code at runtime. Sun Microsystems provides a GNU General Public License implementation of a Java compiler and Java virtual machine, in compliance with the specifications of the Java Community Process.

Java is an ideal language for robust network, server, and web programming. It includes many APIs and frameworks that assist in developing user-interfaces, web services, portals, database integration, mobile applications, and the list goes on.

More information about Java and Java APIs can be found at java.sun.com

JavaScript is a Netscape implementation of ECMAScript, a scripting programming language based on the concept of prototypes. The language is best known for its use in websites, but is also used to enable scripting access to objects embedded in other applications. Despite the name, JavaScript is only loosely related to the Java programming language.

Some common uses of JavaScript are:

• Opening or popping up a new window with programmatic control over the size, position and 'look' of the new window (i.e. whether or not the menus, toolbars etc are visible. Usually JavaScript is used to ensure that they are not)
• Checking or validating web form input values to make sure that they will be accepted before they are submitted to the server
• Changing images as the mouse cursor moves over them
• Detect browser versions to determine compatibility of the site
• Used as the basis for Ajax programming
• Used extensively in the Mozilla Firefox project

The acronym LAMP (or L.A.M.P.) refers to a set of free software programs commonly used together to run dynamic Web sites or servers:

• Linux, the operating system
• Apache, the Web server
• MySQL, the database management system (or database server)
• Perl, PHP, Python, and/or Primate (mod mono), scripting/programming languages

Meta tags are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such elements are placed as tags in the head section of an HTML document. Once used for search engines, but in the early 2000s, search engines have veered away from reliance on meta tags since many web sites used inappropriate meta keywords or a technique known as keyword stuffing, in order to increase their search engine ranking. Some search engines still take meta tags into consideration when delivering results, though most of the major search engines ignore them.

MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user, SQL Database Management System (DBMS) with more than six million installations.

MySQL is popular for web applications such as MediaWiki or Drupal and acts as the database component of the LAMP and WAMP platforms (Linux/Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python), and for open-source bug tracking tools like Bugzilla. Its popularity as a web application is closely tied to the popularity of PHP, which is often combined with MySQL and nicknamed the Dynamic Duo.

MySQL works on many different platforms-including AIX, BSDi, FreeBSD, HP-UX, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Novell NetWare, OpenBSD, OS/2 Warp, QNX, SGI IRIX, Solaris, SunOS, SCO OpenServer, SCO UnixWare, Tru64, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and more recent versions of Windows. A port of MySQL to OpenVMS is also available.

The Microsoft .NET Framework is a component of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It provides a large body of pre-coded solutions to common program requirements, and manages the execution of programs written specifically for the framework. The .NET Framework is a key Microsoft offering, and is intended to be used by most new applications created for the Windows platform and for web applications based on the Windows platform.

Pay per click, or PPC, is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines.

With search engines, pay per click advertisements are usually text ads placed near search results; when a site visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged a small amount. Variants include pay for placement and pay for ranking. Pay per click is also sometimes known as Cost Per Click (CPC).

PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open-source, reflective programming language. Originally designed as a high level scripting language for producing dynamic Web pages, PHP is used mainly in server-side application software. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Ruby is a reflective, object-oriented programming language. It combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like object-oriented features, and also shares some features with Python, Lisp, Dylan and CLU. Ruby is a single-pass interpreted language. Its main implementation is free software distributed under an open-source license.

Ruby on Rails, often called RoR, or just Rails, is an open source web application framework written in Ruby that closely follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. It strives for simplicity and allowing real-world applications to be developed in less code than other frameworks and with a minimum of configuration. The Ruby programming language allows for extensive metaprogramming, which Rails makes much use of. This results in a syntax that many of its users find to be very readable. Rails is primarily distributed through RubyGems, which is the official packaging format and distribution channel for Ruby libraries and applications.

Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), including: pay per click advertisements, paid inclusion listings, and organic search results. SEO is primarily concerned with advancing the goals of a website by improving the number and position of its organic search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords. SEO strategies may increase both the number and quality of visitors. Search engine optimization is sometimes offered as a stand-alone service, or as a part of a larger marketing effort, and can often be very effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site.

The following factors are speculation on some of the considerations search engines may presently be using or which could be built into their algorithms:

• Age of site
• Length of time the domain has been registered
• Age of content
• Frequency of content: regularity with which new content is added
• Age of link to site and reputation of linking site (authority)
• Quality of HTML coding, presence of coding errors

Additional SEO terms

An human-computer interaction and computer science, usability usually refers to the elegance and clarity with which the user interface of a computer program or a web site is designed. Some considerations are:

• Who are the users, what do they know, and what can they learn?
• What do users want or need to do?
• Can users easily accomplish their intended tasks? For example, can users accomplish intended tasks at their intended speed?
• What and how many errors do users make when interacting with the product?

The Extensible HyperText Markup Language. XHTML is the successor to HTML. As such, many consider XHTML to be the “current version” of HTML, but it is a separate, parallel recommendation; the W3C continues to recommend the use of XHTML 1.1, XHTML 1.0, and HTML 4.01 for web publishing.

The need for a more strict version of HTML was felt primarily because World Wide Web content now needs to be delivered to many devices (like mobile devices) apart from traditional computers, where extra resources cannot be devoted to support the additional complexity of HTML syntax.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. In other words, XML is a way of describing data. An XML file can contain the data too, as in a database. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet.