Letter: B
b2b
(Business to Business). Normally used to describe an eBusiness solution that caters to other businesses.
b2Commerce
(Business to Commerce). See b2b above
Backbone
A high-speed line or series of connections that forms a major pathway within a network. The term is relative as a backbone in a small network will likely be much smaller than many non-backbone lines in a large network.
Bandwidth
How much stuff you can send through a connection. Usually measured in bits-per-second. A full page of English text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 15,000 bits in one second. Full-motion full-screen video would require roughly 10,000,000 bits-per-second, depending on compression.
Bandwidth
Measure (in kilobytes of data transferred) of the traffic on the site.
Banners
Banners are the basic unit of advertising on the Web. They were pioneered by GNN and HotWired back in the frontier days of 1994 and are now nearly ubiquitous, appearing in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and locations. You're probably looking at one right now, just above this text.
Baud
In common usage the baud rate of a modem is how many bits it can send or receive per second. Technically, baud is the number of times per second that the carrier signal shifts value - for example a 1200 bit-per-second modem actually runs at 300 baud, but it moves 4 bits per baud (4 x 300 = 1200 bits per second).
baud rate
Same as bps--Bits Per Second). A unit used to measure the number of data bits a modem can transfer in one second. One baud is how many signals a modem can handle in one second. Information is measured in bits, and bits come in the signal. Higher baud modems can send and receive more signals in a second, and the faster speeds also cram more bits into a signal.
BBS
(Bulletin Board System) -- A computerized meeting and announcement system that allows people to carry on discussions, upload and download files, and make announcements without the people being connected to the computer at the same time. There are many thousands (millions?) of BBS’s around the world, most are very small, running on a single IBM clone PC with 1 or 2 phone lines. Some are very large and the line between a BBS and a system like CompuServe gets crossed at some point, but it is not clearly drawn.
Behavior
Microsoft implemented the behavior attribute of Cascading Stylesheets in a way that enabled object-oriented programming to enter the world of Web authoring. By encapsulating dHTML in an external object, the properties and methods of that object can be used. A Web page can then use these objects with the behavior attribute. This means, for example, that a Web author no longer has to perform an explicit browser detection.
BeOS
The BeOS, or Be Operating System, is the flagship product of Be, Inc. BeOS is a lightweight, multi-threaded operating system that has been optimized for the handling of large media files. Be's ultra-quick I/O interface has won it many fans in the worlds of music production, streaming audio and streaming video. Because of its searchable file system and because it ships with its own light-weight Web server, BeOS is also useful for running bandwidth-op timized websites.
binary file
Refers to a file that contains information in a non-text form (graphics, sounds, spreadsheets, etc.). Any file that is not a text file. Any arrangements of bits that is meaningful to a computer, without regard to any correspondence to a human-readable character set.
Binhex
(BINary HEXadecimal) -- A method for converting non-text files (non-ASCII) into ASCII. This is needed because Internet e-mail can only handle ASCII.
Bit
(Binary DigIT) -- A single digit number in base-2, in other words, either a 1 or a zero. The smallest unit of computerized data. Bandwidth is usually measured in bits-per-second.
Bit Depth
Bit depth describes the file size of an image by orders of magnitude. When wrangling with file size versus image quality, it's often important to minimize the bit depth of an image while maximizing the number of colors. To calculate the maximum number of colors for an image of a particular bit depth, remember that the number of colors is equal to two to the power of what the bit depth is. For example, a GIF can support up to eight bits per pixel, and therefore can have as a many as 256 colors, since two to the power of eight equals 256.
Bitmap
A bitmap is a mapped array of pixels that can be saved as a file. Both JPEG and GIF are bitmap graphic formats. Currently, the only other way to store an image is as a vector graphic. You can't easily scale bitmap images, but you can control every single pixel and thus achieve many effects impossible in vector graphics. Conversely, vector formats offer advantages of scalability and lower bandwidth requirements. When you compress a bitmapped image, you suck out some of the visual information. To bypass this, the portable network graphics format (or PNG, pronounced "ping") was designed to store a single bitmap image for transmittal over computer networks without losing this data.
BITNET
(Because It’s Time NETwork (or Because It’s There NETwork)) -- A network of educational sites separate from the Internet, but e-mail is freely exchanged between BITNET and the Internet. Listservs®, the most popular form of e-mail discussion groups, originated on BITNET. BITNET machines are usually mainframes running the VMS operating system, and the network is probably the only international network that is shrinking
bookmark
or favorite) Most Web browsers give you an option of adding a URL to a "HotList" or by marking it with a "Bookmark". By doing this, you can store the linking information (the URL) to any Web pages you plan to revisit. That way, if you decide to go back to a Web site, its URL is already catalogued and at your fingertips for easy reference. (Spry Mosaic uses "HotLists", Netscape Navigator uses "Bookmarks" and Microsoft Internet Explorer uses "Favorites"). Other Web browsers may use those terms, or may call their URL-saving feature something else.)
Boolean logic
A system for searching and retrieving information from computers by using and combining terms such as AND, OR, and NOT to sort data.
Bps
(Bits-Per-Second) -- A measurement of how fast data is moved from one place to another. A 28.8 modem can move 28,800 bits per second.
Branding
Branding is the messaging work a company does to encourage consumers to feel a certain way about their product. From touchy-feely character attributes to laundry lists of product features, it's a marketer's job to help you assimilate these ideas.
Broadband
Broadband is a general term used to describe any high-speed, high-bandwidth, "always on" Internet connection. Cable modems, DSL modems, satellite link-ups, and T1 lines are all broadband devices. Dial-up modems and other low-bandwidth devices are called "narrowband."
Browser
Browsers are software programs that view Web pages and help you move through the Web. The browser that triggered the WWW explosion was Mosaic, a public domain graphical user interface (GUI) from the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA). Released in 1993, Mosaic made it possible to design documents containing images for display over the Internet. Up to that point, an Internet document was basically just a bunch of text on a server. In 1994, Mosaic ship-jumper Marc Andreessen released Netscape 1.1, following Mosaic's successful lead, by distributing the browser free of charge on the Internet in order to establish a wide user base.
Browser
A Client program (software) that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.
Browser
A program used to locate and view HTML documents (Netscape, Mosaic, Microsoft Explorer, for example.)
Browser
Short for Web Browser; it's the tool (program) that allows you to surf the web. You probably used your Web Browser to locate this page. The most popular Web Browsers right now are Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.
BSD
Short for Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD is a full-featured Unix operating system developed at the University of California at Berkeley. Its main application today is as a robust and scalable Web server, though different permutations have arisen over the years that expand upon the original code. Different flavors of BSD Unix include NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. BSD remains popular at universities and throughout the open source movement.
BTW
By The Way) -- A shorthand appended to a comment written in an online forum.
Byte
A set of Bits that represent a single character. Usually there are 8 Bits in a Byte, sometimes more, depending on how the measurement is being made.
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