Glossary
- Authentication
Programming
Authentication is any mechanism by which a website visitor is required to identify themselves to the site before being able to use certain features.
- Basic Level Category
Philosophy
From Lakoff and Johnson. Human perception employs a process of basic level categorisation. These are the simplest forms to which any object can be reduced, and includes concepts such as "car" or "tree". It is basic level categories which allows humans to act with agility. For example, there is no need for a person to study the detail of a car speeding towards them, nor to recognise even what type of car it is, the basic level information of "car", "fast" and "this way" is enough for them to take action. After the event has past, the prior experience of the participant fills in the experiential gaps, red car, hatch-back and so on, presenting a rounded picture of the moment.
- Basic Metaphor
Philosophy
A term I have inadvertantly invented by mashing up the embodiment terms of "Basic Level Category" and Primary Metaphor which are two terms frequently used by Lakoff and Johnson. When I use this term, I mean Basic Level Category
- Bleed
Comic Art
Print industry standard term for any image which extends to any one or multiple sides of the physical page. "The image bleeds off the page". Used by comic artists to add a sense of epic scale to certain scenes and as a technique for breaking the confined nature of comic frames.
- Bug
Programming
An error in software which causes undesirable results or the software to perform unexpectedly.
- CSS
Programming
Cascading Style Sheet: The now industry standard way of applying styling to HTML. The intention is to keep the HTML markup data seperate from the presentation information these sheets contain.
- Camera Position
Comic Art
The position from which a frame is drawn. A film-making analogy used by comic artists to name the imaginary point in space that the reader adopts relative to the events in comic. Similar to a literal camera position when discussing film-making.
- Closure
Comic theory (although is is known by other names in other fields)
Coined by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics, the term "closure" refers to the act on the part of the reader of adding in information or detail not specifically articulated in a passage of a comic book. These details can take many forms, for example visual details left out by the artist or temporal details of events which happen between a pair of panels. These details the reader fills in and completes from his or her own experience forming "closure" with the narrative.
- Closure
Gestalt Psycology
The human perceptual process of attributing more qualities and meaning than are present onto or into a stimulus which employs reduced detail. The missing detail is fleshed out subconciously by viewer using past experience and cultural knowledge to make sense of what is being percieved. See Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, page 31 for a visual example.
- Coding Standards
Programming
A set of guidelines which attempt to describe well formed code. When in the web markup sphere these are codified by the W3C
- Compiler
Programming
A software application which transforms source code, from a form readable by humans to a form readable by computers.
- Complex Metaphor
Philosophy
From Lakoff and Johnson. A concept formed by the conjunction of a number of primary metaphors. "His stocks are rising" is an example of a complex metaphor where the "good is up" primary metaphor is mediated by the "a purposeful life is a journey" primary metaphor to suggest that the subject is advancing his professional and/or monetary position, moving him significantly closer to his lifes goal.
- Continuity
Gestalt Psycology
The human perceptual process of attribting values to artefacts based on their spatial relationship to each other. A row of houses or traffic lights are examples of continuity.
- Coupling
Human Computer Interaction
A term used by Paul Dourish to describe the perceptual linkage made by the user of a control between the result of the action which is performed when the control is opperated and how the control manifests itself as a visual, environmental and cultural arefact.
- Dead Weight Line
Comic Art
An ink line of consistant width. Gary Martin advocates the use of such a line for rendering non-organic objects.
- Debug
Programming
Literally, to remove the bugs from software.
- Embodiment
Philosophy
"Embodiment is the central theme in European phenomenology, with its most extensive treatment in the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty's account of embodiment distinguishes between the objective body, which is the body regarded as a physiological entity, and the phenomenal body, which is not just some body, some particular physiological entity, but my (or your) body as I (or you) experience it. Of course, it is possible to experience one's own body as a physiological entity. But this is not typically the case."
- Floating Layers
Programming
A CSS technique which re-positions elements of HTML outside of the natural document flow.
- Frameset
Programming
A controversial web technology which employs a structure of HTML markup to define a page which acts as a container for one to many child pages. The controversial aspects of framesets are mainly a legacy of older web browsers and some screen readers which cannot read the content of the child pages.
- HTML
Programming
Hypertext Markup Language. HTML was responsible in part for the birth of the web. It is a markup language which is used to describe data contained by web pages.
- HTML Tables
Programming
A group of HTML tags which are used to define data sets which can easily be laid out in columns and rows. These elements can also in some cases be used to define areas of a web page although this practice is becoming increasingly frowned upon as the resultant page is confusing to read in markup form, difficult to maintain and almost unusable to screen reader equiped visitors.
- Infintite Canvas
Comic Art / Web Comics
Coined by Scott McCloud in Reinventing Comics the term infinite canvas is used to describe the potentially limitless page size afforded the web comic artist / author by the scrolling function of web browsers. This stands as opposed to the traditional comic printed page with definite and defined edges which the artist / author must ahear to in most cases (I'll not begin a discussion of lift up flaps here).
- Java
Programming
A post compiler programming language which was amongst the first to champion the object oriented type of programming architecture.
- Javascript
Programming
A script language common to most modern web browser software. Not as fully featured or powerful as a full compiler language, script languages allow the web browser to perform simple computational tasks on the web page which contains it and on the web browser environment. Javascript is not the only browser scripting language but it is by far the most common.
- Object Oriented
Programming
A type of computer programming which has become very popular over the last decade. It requires that the programmer build, extend and utilise programming blocks called "objects". Most programming languages have presently adopted an Object Oriented structure. Its popularity is responsible in part to a modular approach to programming which keeps chunks of code small and managable.
- PHP
Programming
PHP Hypertext Pre-Processor (a recursive acronym). PHP is a pre-compiler server side programming language. The advantages of PHP are that its easy to learn, powerful, easy to integrate with databases (particularly MySQL and PostgreSQL) and quick to deploy as it is compiled at run time by the PHP compiler. Its major disadvantage is that the PHP compiler can become overloaded on high traffic sites as it is needed to generate object code on each and every page request, as opposed to a post-compiler language such as Java which compiles the source code once and stores the object code which is then run on request without the need to recompile.
- Parse
Programming
To interpret a series of tokens to establish a structure based on an understood grammer. With respect to web technologies this term refers to how a web browser application will interpret and display a HTML web page.
- Post Compiler
Programming
A post compiler programming language requires the intervention of the programmer to begin the compile process and generate the object code. Once compiled the object code is stored and re-used. The resultant code is quicker and more economical to run than pre-compiler languages but takes much longer to compile and deploy.
- Pre-compiler
Programming
A pre-compiler programming language is transformed into object code automatically by the server as and when the code is needed. It is quicker to develop and deploy than post compiler languages but is not as effective in heavy traffic environments.
- Present at Hand
Philosophy
From Heidegger and a term used and explained by Dourish.
Present at hand is described in opposition to "ready to hand and is an object which demands direct attention. Taking the ready to hand example of the hammer, if this hammer were to break it ceases to be ready to hand and becomes present at hand.
These two concepts can be viewed from this position (at least in this body of research) as similar to McLuhan's "hot" and "cool" media.
- Primary Metaphor
Philosophy
From Lakoff and Johnson. The atomic metaphors such as "life is a journey", "good is up" and "bad is down" from which complex metaphors are formed allowing humans to form complex understandings in an effort-efficient manner.
- Proximity
Gestalt Psycology
The human perceptual process of classifying artefacts based on their physical relationshiop to each other. A group of people or a murder of crows are both examples of this prinicpal.
- Ready To Hand
Philosophy
From Heidegger and a term used and explained by Dourish.
Ready to hand is a concept relating to a tool which the weilder may act through, that is to utilise without direct attention. The often given example is of a hammer. The hammer is used to strike an object. The subject of the hammer's strike is the focus of the weilder's attention rather than the hammer, the hammer is acted through in the act of hammering.
Ready to hand is presented in opposition to "present at hand".
These two concepts can be viewed from this position (at least in this body of research) as similar to McLuhan's "hot" and "cool" media.
- Rough Pencils
Comic Art
Pencilled artwork displaying a high degree of sketchiness. Used by comic artists to rough out page layouts and panel compositions before transfering to artboard for rendering with tight pencils.
- Screen Reader
Programming
A type of web browser for the visually impared. The screen reader will audibly "speak" the content of the page rather than displaying it visually.
- Server Side Programming Language
Programming
A programming language which runs alongside the webserver software which houses the web site or application. When a page request is made to the webserver some server side program code is run which makes logic decisions based on the request and compiles an HTML response which the webserver then serves to the client making the request. Server side programming allows web sites to take advantage of anything.
- Static Markup
Programming
Usually HTML. This term refers to HTML pages hard coded by hand and not created flexibly with the assiatance of a server side programming language.
- Tight Pencils
Comic Art
Pencilled artwork displaying a high degree of clarity and finishing. Usually features unambiguous lines and clear indication of the placement of black areas. Tight pencils are used by all but the most fastidious of artists on work they intend to be inked by someone else. The most fastidious also use tight pencils when they intend to ink themselves.
- Web Comic
Web Comics
Literally a comic designed for reading in the web environment. This does not include comics which have been scanned from print and placed on a web page, rather comics which have been created for the web and which respond to the features a web environment affords.
- Webservice
Programming
A method of machine to machine interaction utilising a common form of communication (often XML) over a network.
- XHTML
Programming
Extensible Hypertext Markup Language. A very specific branch of HTML which strickly specifies the standards by which it is coded should also be compatible with XML standards. Major differnces from HTML inlcude:
- Forced lower case tag names
- Forced surrounding of attribute values with quotation marks
- Forced closing of all tags
- Forced correctly nested tags
- XML
Programming
Extensible Markup Language. Used by programmers as a means of encoding data in a meaningful manner. The idea is that by surrounding data with plain language tags these tags then describe the data so making it easier to manage. Used in numerous applications mainly for configuration file definitions.