Website Definitions

As used on the New Zealand Rare Breeds Website

Associates (of New Zealand Rare Breeds): Individuals or Societies who have their own websites or advertising pages set up by and hosted on New Zealand Rare Breeds. As this website is operated by volunteers, the total amount of the fee paid for this service goes to activities of the Rare Breeds Conservation Society of New Zealand Incorporated.

Browser: A computer program that can read, display and navigate websites on a computer. Examples of commonly used browsers are Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Netscape.

CSS: Short for Cascading Style Sheets – which are used by website designers to provide detailed control over the formatting and presentation of webpages. Extensive use of CSS is made in this website.

Domain Name: The unique name that identifies an Internet website. Domain names always have two or more parts, separated by dots. The part on the left identifies the site, the part on the right is the grouping under which the name is registered, e.g. rarebreeds.co.nz   (See also URL.)

Hit: A request from a Browser for a single item from a web server. By way of example, in order for a Browser to display a page that contains text and three illustrations (such as a typical breed description page on this Website), four "hits" would occur at the web server – one for the text part of the page, and one for each of the three illustrations. (A web server is a host computer that transmits items over the Internet when it receives requests from a Browser.)

Home Page: Usually the first page to be seen when a website is called up by entering a simple Internet address (URL) on a Browser. It is the central or initial page of a website, and other webpages are generally linked (connected) to it.

HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language" which is the original computer 'language' used to define and describe the layout of webpages displayed on browsers. This language is no longer being developed.

HTTP ("HyperText Transfer Protocol") – the underlying system that allows information (such as webpages) to be transferred over the Internet.

Internet: A collection of computers that are all connected to each other internationally. Some are connected 24 hours a day; others – particularly home computers – are connected only as required. It is also known as the Net.

Link: Clickable word(s) or graphics on a webpage that take the viewer to another place on the same page, to another webpage, or to another whole website. Also called "hyperlink".

Navigation Bar: A strip on a webpage that contains links to other pages (there is one at the top of this page).

New Zealand Rare Breeds: The name of the official website of the Rare Breeds Conservation Society of New Zealand Incorporated (i.e. this website).

Site Map: An overview of a website that lists all the pages available and provides active links to them.

Page: Short for Webpage (see below).

URL: (Uniform Resource Locator) – The address of a site on the Internet. The first part of the address indicates what system is used, and the second part is the domain name of the site, e.g. http://www.rarebreeds.co.nz   Also known as URI (Uniform Resource Indicator).

Visit: There is little general agreement as to the definition of a "visit" to a website – it varies greatly from a "hit" (see above) to someone viewing a particular website for up to several hours at a time. On the New Zealand Rare Breeds website, a "visit" is counted as someone viewing one or more pages of the site on their browser during a single viewing "session" (in most cases more than one page is viewed in one session but it is counted as a single visit).

Webpage: A single page of a website; it will commonly include text, graphics, and links to other web pages. Typically the whole of a single webpage can be accessed using the PgDn and PgUp keys or the scroll bar on the side of the computer screen. Also known as Page.

Website: A group of similar or associated webpages connected by links and managed by a single company, organization, or individual. Websites can range in size from as little as one page to a vast number of pages. Also known as Site.

WWW (World Wide Web): An ever-changing collection of hundreds of millions of "documents" (mostly webpages and their components) which reside somewhere on the Internet. Also known as Web.

XHTML stands for "Extensible HyperText Markup Language" – the successor to ordinary HTML (see above). It has some different formatting rules and is stricter in its requirements, but provides greater reliability, more flexible design, and results in more consistent layouts. This website is written in XHTML.

The above definitions are very much simplfied. For more detailed or other website definitions, use the Google Search facility below, preceding the word or term you want defined with the operator "define:" with no space between it and the word you want defined (e.g. define:conservation).