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Glossary

Sometimes our enthusiasm gets the better of us and we disappear into techno speak. What does it all mean? Well here we hope to explain some of the more common terms.
If you have any technical jargon you are struggling with, use our contact form to ask us, and see the picture more clearly!

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	Active Server Pages (ASP): A server-side programming language that is designed to create dynamically generated HTML pages for the World Wide Web. This allows the site to be interactive with the visitor, allowing them to search databases, post to forums, etc. etc. ASP can also help the site owner quickly update content like footers in one location, but for all pages. The Planner Demo on this site is an example of ASP.
	Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): A data format used to separate style from structure on Web pages. CSS addresses many of the problems of old-style HTML. Some of the older tags, especially the notorious <FONT>, clutter Web page source code and make for inflexible sites. With CSS, style information can be centralized. This centralization leads to increased power and flexibility. With CSS, designers are able to use tags to reference a style rather than describe it at each instance. Then, when a style needs to be changed, only the referenced declarations need to be changed, not all of the instances where it is used.
	Dynamic Hyper Text Mark-up Language (DHTML): DHTML, or Dynamic HTML, is a new web technology that enables elements inside your web page to be, well, dynamic. Things once considered unchangeable once the page has loaded, such as text, page styles (font color, size etc), element position, etc, can now all be changed dynamically, thanks to DHTML. An example of DHTML is the way this content appears and disappears when you click the icons to the left.
	Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML): The language of the web! HTML is how web pages are written. It describes the page layout, for example if you want bold text then just place bold tags around the text like <b>Hello</b>. If you are using Internet Explorer then to view the HTML for this page, just right this text and choose <View Source> from the menu that pops up.
	JavaScript: JavaScript is a popular client-side scripting language because it is supported by both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. JavaScript allows such interactive features as form input checking, personalization and other special effects on web pages. JavaScript code may be placed within each page or in a external file called by requested pages.
	VPN: A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is used to provide secure, encrypted network communications between a network and a remote host or other remote network over the public Internet. VPN allows the establishment of an encrypted "tunnel" that protects the flow of network traffic from eavesdroppers.