CHATROOM: An electronic space, typically a website or a section of an online service, where people can go to communicate online in real time. Chat rooms are often organized around specific interests, such as small business owners, gardening, etc.

EMAIL LIST: A list of email addresses which have been associated to one master address. By sending an email to the master address, the message is automatically sent to all of the associated addresses.

HOMEPAGE: Also referred to as a web page. The starting point of a Web presentation and a sort of table of contents for what is at the website, offering direct links to the different parts of the site.

ICON: A small image, usually a symbol, used to graphically represent a software program, file, or function on a computer screen. Icons make it easier to recognize and locate these things.

INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS: Also called ISPs or access providers. The remote computer system to which you connect your personal computer and through which you connect to the Internet. ISPs that you access by modem and telephone line are often called dial-up services.

LINK: Generally refers to any highlighted words or phrases in a hypertext document that allow you to "jump" to another section of the same document or to another document on the World Wide Web.

LOGIN: The account name used to access a computer system. It is the way people identify themselves to their online service or Internet access provider. Also called User ID, User Name, or Account Name.

NAVIGATION TOOLS: Navigation tools allow users to find their way around a website or multimedia presentation. They can be hypertext links, clickable buttons, icons, or image maps. Navigation tools are usually present either at the bottom or top (sometimes both) of each page or screen and typically allow users to return to the previous page, move forward to the next page, jump to the top of the current page and return to the home page.

PASSWORD: A password is a code or word used to gain access to restricted data on a computer network. While passwords provide security against unauthorized users, the security system can only confirm that the password is legitimate, not whether the user is authorized to use the password. That's why it is important to safeguard passwords:

• Never disclose your password.
• Devise a password that consists of letters, numbers, and symbols.
• Change your password frequently.

WEBSITE: A collection of web pages which are typically centered around one subject and are located at the same address. Usually a site will be created and maintained by a single person or team.

WORLD WIDE WEB: The exact definition for the World Wide Web (popularly known as the Web) varies, depending on whom you ask. Three common descriptions are:

1. A collection of resources (Gopher, FTP, http, telnet, Usenet, WAIS and others) which can be accessed via a web browser.
2. A collection of hypertext files available on web servers.
3. A set of specifications (protocols) that allows the transmission of web pages over the Internet.

You can think of the Web as a worldwide collection of text and multimedia files and other network services interconnected via a system of hypertext documents. HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) was created in 1990, at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, as a means for sharing scientific data internationally, instantly, and inexpensively. With hypertext a word or phrase can contain a link to other text. To achieve this they developed a programming language called HTML, that allows you to easily link you to other pages or network services on the Web.

If you encounter a page with a word that is highlighted in some way (usually in a different color and underlined), you can click on that word and "go to" the page or resource to which connects. Of course, you are not actually "going" anywhere when you do this, but rather, you are summoning the file or resource that the link points to. This non-linear, non-hierarchical method of accessing information was a breakthrough in information sharing and quickly became the major source of traffic on the Internet.

The basic elements of the World Wide Web are:

• HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) - the set of standards used by computers to communicate and share files with each other.
• URL's (Uniform Resource Locator) - the "address" of a resource (file or diretory) on the Web.
• HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) - the programming "tags" added to text documents that turn them into hypertext documents.