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Accessibility (a11y)
Best practices for keeping a website accessible for people with any kind of disability. The acronym comes from the fact that there is 11 letters between a and y in accessibility.
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API
Short for “Application Program Interface”, how computers and applications communicate with one another.
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Attribute
Attributes are special words used inside the opening tag to control an HTML Element’s behavior
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Breakpoint
These are points when your website will adjust to accommodate the screen size to make sure the user has the best experience viewing the website at that size.
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Browser
The program you use to access the Web — such as Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.
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Bug
An error or flaw in the website or app that keeps it from running as expected.
- Cache
Cache is temporary data storage that helps site speed by storing relevant information on your computer the first time you visit a website. Thanks to cache, when you visit the website again, your computer does not have to reload all the website information as it’s already saved.
- Client side
Code run on the client, for example in a users browser.
- Crawl
This is the process used by search engines that involves sending a bot to your website to gather information on pages that exist and no longer exist and update their database on the information it has gathered. It is necessary to get indexed by search engines and get found.
- CSS Selectors
A CSS selector selects the HTML elements you want to style. The commonly used selectors use HTML classes, IDs, and tags; but there are a plethora of complex selectors that can be used to granularly select elements.
- CSS Property
Characteristics that are dictated by CSS such as color schemes and fonts.
- CTA
Short for Call to Action. These are elements (generally buttons) on your website that drive certain conversions or goals such as donations, newsletter signups, or user registrations.
- CMS
Content Management System. A system that helps users manage the content of a website, for example Wordpress or Contentful.
- CRUD
Short for Create, Read, Update, Delete. Used to describe the basic operations of persistent storage. Sometimes also refers to simple websites where all you can do is these actions.
- CLI
A command-line interface (CLI) is a text-based user interface (UI) used to run programs, manage computer files and interact with the computer. Command-line interfaces are also called command-line user interfaces, console user interfaces and character user interfaces. CLIs accept as input commands that are entered by keyboard; the commands invoked at the command prompt are then run by the computer.
- DevTools
Short for developer tools. Usually refers to the developer tools of browsers like Firefox or Chrome, but could also refer to devtool extensions for frameworks (React, Vue).
- Deployment
Deployment is a combination of all of the activities that make a software system available for use.
- DOM
The Document Object Model is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an XML or HTML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. The DOM represents a document with a logical tree.
- Environment variable
Variables set on the environment in which the “app” is deployed.
- Favicon
Short for “favorite icon”, it’s the icon that appears in your website’s browser tab.
- Framework
A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build and deploy web applications on the World Wide Web. Web frameworks aim to automate the overhead associated with common activities performed in web development.
- Hydration
Hydration is the process of using client-side JavaScript to add application state and interactivity to server-rendered HTML.
- HTTP
Hypertext Transport (or Transfer) Protocol, the data transfer protocol used on the World Wide Web.
- HTTPS
Basically the same as HTTP, but uses encryption methods to secure the data passed to and from webpages.
- Internationalization (i18n)
Best practices for enabling a site to be adapted to any culture (language etc). The acronym comes from the fact that there is 18 letters between i and n in internationalization.
- iFrame
HTML element used to embed a website within another website.
- IDE
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools and a debugger.
- Localization (l10n)
The act of adapting a site to a specific culture. For example translating texts, formatting numbers etc. The acronym comes from the fact that there is 10 letters between l and n in localization.
- Light House
Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for testing and improving the quality of web pages.
- Minification
Minification is the process of minimizing code and markup to reduce the file size.
- Mobile-first
Mobile-first is an approach to web design and development that prioritizes mobile devices. Rather than building a website with a desktop in mind and then considering how it might look on a mobile device, with a mobile-first approach, the website is first built for the small screen.
- MVP
Short for Minimum Viable Product, refers to the most pared-down version of a product that can be released to the market.
- Navigation
Links on a website that points to the other pages. Generally found in the menu at the top of a site or in a footer.
- robots.txt
Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct web robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl pages on their website. The robots.txt file is part of the the robots exclusion protocol (REP), a group of web standards that regulate how robots crawl the web, access and index content, and serve that content up to users.
- Responsive Design
Responsive design ensures that a website is displayed correctly no matter what device the user is viewing it on.
- Server side
Code run on a server.
- SEO
Search Engine Optimization. Practices for optimizing a websites ranking in search engines such as Google.
- Sitemap
A document used by search engine bots to find all the pages on your site.
- SPA
A single-page application (SPA) is a web application or website that interacts with the user by dynamically rewriting the current web page with new data from the web server, instead of the default method of a web browser loading entire new pages. The goal is faster transitions that make the website feel more like a native app.
In a SPA, a page refresh never occurs; instead, all necessary HTML, JavaScript, and CSS code is either retrieved by the browser with a single page load, or the appropriate resources are dynamically loaded and added to the page as necessary, usually in response to user actions.
- SSG
A static site generator is a software application that creates HTML pages from templates or components and a given content source.
- SSR
Server-side rendering refers to an application’s ability to display the web-page on the server rather than rendering it in the browser. When a website’s JavaScript is rendered on the website’s server, a fully rendered page is sent to the client and the client’s JavaScript bundle engages and enables the Single Page Application framework to operate.
- SAAS
Software as a service (or SaaS) is a way of delivering applications over the Internet as a service.
- SEO
Abbreviated as SEO, it is the process of creating and modifying content for the best visibility on search engines.
- Semantic HTML
Semantic HTML is the use of HTML markup to reinforce the semantics, or meaning, of the information in webpages and web applications rather than merely to define its presentation or look.
- Sitemap
Outline of all pages on a website, organized in hierarchical order
- SVG
The representation of a digital image as rectangles, lines and other geometric entities, resulting in the image being scalable to any size.
- Sitemap
A document used by search engine bots to find all the pages on your site.
- Tree-shaking
Tree shaking is a term commonly used within a JavaScript context to describe the removal of dead code.
It relies on the import and export statements to detect if code modules are exported and imported for use between JavaScript files.
In modern JavaScript applications, we use module bundlers to automatically remove dead code when bundling multiple JavaScript files into single files. This is important for preparing code that is production ready, for example with clean structures and minimal file size.
- User Agent
A string indicating what web browser that is used.
- UI
User Interface. All the things you see on a web page.
- UX (User Experience)
How users interact with a web site but also how the web site affects user.
- URL
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is a unique identifier used to locate a resource on the Internet. It is also referred to as a web address. URLs consist of multiple parts -- including a protocol and domain name -- that tell a web browser how and where to retrieve a resource.
End users use URLs by typing them directly into the address bar of a browser or by clicking a hyperlink found on a webpage, bookmark list, in an email or from another application.
- URI
A Universal Resource Identifier (URI) is a member of this universal set of names in registered name spaces and addresses referring to registered protocols or name spaces.
- URL vs. URI
URI identifies a resource and differentiates it from others by using a name, location, or both. URL identifies the web address or location of a unique resource. URI contains components like a scheme, authority, path, and query. URL has similar components to a URI, but its authority consists of a domain name and port.
- WYSIWYG
Stands for “What You See is What You Get”. It is a visual content editor that allows you to modify content as Rich Text (text with formatting)