Website Design and Development Glossary

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M

Mail Bomb

A huge number of e-mail messages sent to one destination or an e-mail with an extremely large attached file. Mail bombs are sent to antagonize their recipients and/or to cause them problems by filling up their disks and overloading the system.

Source: TechWeb.com

Merchant Bank

A credit card processing bank; merchants receive credit for credit card receipts less a processing fee.

Source: Dictionary.com

Meta Tag

An HTML tag that identifies the contents of a Web page for the search engines. Meta tags are hidden on the page, but they, as well as all the HTML code on a page, can be viewed by selecting View/Source or View/Page Source from the browser menu. Meta tags contain a general description of the page, keywords and copyright information.

Source: TechWeb.com

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)

A communications protocol that allows for the transmission of data in many forms, such as audio, binary, or video.

Source: Dictionary.com

Mirror Site

An archive site or web site which keeps a copy of some or all files at another site so as to make them more quickly available and to reduce the load on the source site.

It is generally best to use the mirror that is physically closest to you as this will usually give the fastest download.

Such mirroring is usually done for specific whole directories or files on a specific remote server as opposed to a cache or proxy server which keeps copies of everything that is requested via it.

For example, src.doc.ic.ac.uk is the main UK mirror for the GNU archive at gnu.org.

Source: Dictionary.com

Modem

A device for transmitting usually digital data over telephone wires by modulating the data into an audio signal to send it and demodulating an audio signal into data to receive it.

Source: Dictionary.com

Mosaic

NCSA's browser (client) for the World-Wide Web.

Mosaic has been described as "the killer application of the 1990s" because it was the first program to provide a slick multimedia graphical user interface to the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services (formerly mostly limited to FTP and Gopher) at a time when access to the Internet was expanding rapidly outside its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions.

NCSA Mosaic was originally designed and programmed for the X Window System by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA. Version 1.0 was released in April 1993, followed by two maintenance releases during summer 1993. Version 2.0 was released in December 1993, along with version 1.0 releases for both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. An Acorn Archimedes port is underway (May 1994).

Marc Andreessen, who created the NCSA Mosaic research prototype as an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois left to start Mosaic Communications Corporation along with five other former students and staff of the university who were instrumental in NCSA Mosaic's design and development.

Source: Dictionary.com

MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group)

Any of a set of standards established for the compression of digital video and audio data.

Source: Dictionary.com

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