Technical Terms Glossary - Programming and Web Terms

This glossary defines common technical terms you will encounter when using our developer tools and reading technical content.

A

API (Application Programming Interface)

A set of protocols and tools for building software applications. APIs define how software components interact.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange. A character encoding standard for electronic communication, representing 128 characters.

B

Base64

An encoding scheme that represents binary data using 64 printable ASCII characters. Base64 is used for email attachments, data URLs, and JSON Web Tokens.

Binary

A base-2 number system using only 0 and 1. All data in computers is ultimately stored as binary.

Boolean

A data type with two values: true or false. Named after mathematician George Boole.

C

Character Encoding

A system for representing characters as numbers. Common encodings include ASCII, UTF-8, and UTF-16.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

A style sheet language used for describing the presentation of HTML documents.

D

DOM (Document Object Model)

A programming interface for HTML and XML documents that represents the page as a tree structure.

E

Encoding

The process of converting data from one format to another. Examples include Base64 encoding, URL encoding, and HTML encoding.

Encryption

The process of converting data into a form that can only be read with a decryption key. Unlike encoding, encryption provides confidentiality.

H

Hash

A fixed-length output produced by a one-way mathematical function. Hashes are used for integrity verification and digital signatures.

Hexadecimal

A base-16 number system using digits 0-9 and letters A-F. Hexadecimal is commonly used to represent binary data compactly.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language)

The standard markup language for creating web pages.

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)

The protocol used for transferring data over the web. HTTPS is the secure version using TLS encryption.

J

JavaScript

A programming language that runs in web browsers and on servers (via Node.js). JavaScript enables interactive web pages.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)

A lightweight data interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write and easy for machines to parse and generate.

M

MIME Type

A standard that indicates the nature and format of a document. Examples: text/html, application/json, image/png.

R

Regex (Regular Expression)

A pattern-matching language used for searching and manipulating text based on patterns.

S

Schema

A definition of the structure of data, used for validation. JSON Schema and XML Schema are common schema languages.

SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm)

A family of cryptographic hash functions including SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512. SHA-256 and SHA-512 are secure; SHA-1 is broken.

U

Unicode

A computing industry standard for consistent encoding and representation of text in most writing systems.

URI/URL

Uniform Resource Identifier/Locator. A string that identifies a resource, commonly known as a web address.

UTF-8

A variable-length character encoding capable of encoding all possible Unicode characters. UTF-8 is the dominant encoding on the web.

UUID (Universally Unique Identifier)

A 128-bit identifier that is effectively unique without central coordination. UUIDs are used as database keys and distributed system identifiers.

X

XML (eXtensible Markup Language)

A markup language that defines rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.

Y

YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language)

A human-friendly data serialization standard for all programming languages, commonly used for configuration files.