Glossary of Terms and Jargon¶
- API
Application Programming Interface (like a GUI for computers).
- ARIA
Accessible Rich Internet Applications.
- CSS
Cascading Style Sheets, the collection of technologies used to change how elements on a web page look.
- CG
Community Group (at the W3C).
- CLA
Contributors License Agreement
- DOM
Document Object Model.
- Ecma
The name of the standards body that makes ECMAScript, the standard for the JavaScript programming language.
- Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system; project homepage: https://git-scm.com/
- GitHub
a website that provides hosting for software development version control using Git; homepage: https://github.com
- HTML
Hypertext Markup Language, the collection of technologies for structuring and linking between documents on the web.
- HTTP
Hypertext Transfer Protocol
- HTTP Archive
A database of the HTML, CSS and JS response bodies and other data of the top several million1,000,000 pages, collected twice per month. Useful for figuring out how web developers use the web, and what changes will be compatible.
- Interoperable
Different implementations behave exactly the same for a given case.
- IPR
Intellectual Property Rights
- IRC
Internet Relay Chat - how people chat with each other about web standards (instead of slack).
- JS
JavaScript - the programming language used to manipulate the behavior of web pages, and to write programs that can run on web pages and in Node.js.
- Living Standard
A versionless continuously maintained standard (at the WHATWG).
- Node.js
An open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a web browser.
- Node Global
- Normative
content in a specification that contains requirements or is referenced by something that is normative.
- Non-normative
content in a specification that is not normative, such as examples or statements of fact.
- Prose
written words.
- PR
pull request (in GitHub).
- Runtime
A jargon term for the environment in which code runs, like a browser, or Node.js, etc. The term is derived from the runtime phase of a computer’s execution of a program. Browsers and Node.js both run third party code, so we often refer to them casually as “runtimes”. This term is also used to refer to the details and API surface of the environment that the program is running in. For example JavaScript code in an HTML document has access to the window object in it’s runtime, whereas the same code running in Node.js would have acces to the Node Global.
- Spec
short for specification.
- SVG
Scalable Vector Graphics.
- TC
Technical Committee (at Ecma).
- TSC
Technical Steering Committee
- UA
User Agent - a piece of software that acts on behalf of the user. For example, a web browser.
- W3C
World Wide Web Consortium.
- Web compatible
In the context of implementations, behavior that matches user expectation for existing web content. In the context of web standards, required behavior for user agents that matches user expectations when using existing web content, and lack of required behavior that breaks those expectations.
- WG
Working Group (at the W3C).
- WHATWG
Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group.
- WPT
web-platform-tests; a cross-browser test suite for the Web-platform stack; project homepage: https://web-platform-tests.org
- Window
the main global object in a web page.
