Glossary
What the words on this site mean — one line each, with a link to the people who define them.
This site explains itself in public. The credits name every piece of technology behind it, the notes argue about browser bugs, and the conformance claim cites clauses by number — so a reader who follows any of that meets words that are precise and unfamiliar at the same time.
Each one below gets a line. The name links to the people who define it, because a summary is a place to start and a specification is the thing that is true.
- Ansible
- a tool that puts a server into a written-down state
- ARIA
- extra markup that names a control for assistive tech
- axe
- the accessibility engine this site is audited with
- cache
- a stored copy a browser may reuse instead of asking
- canonical URL
- the one address a page says is its own
- Content Security Policy
- a list of where a page may load things from
- contrast ratio
- how far apart two colours are, as a number
- Core Web Vitals
- three measurements of how a page feels to use
- DNS
- the directory turning a name into an address
- Docker
- a way to ship a program with everything it needs
- favicon
- the small picture a browser shows beside a page
- feed
- a page's updates, in a format you subscribe to
- gemtext
- a text format with one link per line
- Gopher
- a menu protocol older than the web
- hreflang
- the attribute pairing a page with its translations
- HSTS
- a browser's promise to use HTTPS next time
- HTTP
- the request and answer the web is built on
- HTTPS
- the same requests, over an encrypted connection
- idempotent
- safe to run twice, because the second time changes nothing
- Kubernetes
- a system that keeps a fleet of containers running
- Lighthouse
- Chrome's own audit of speed, markup and good practice
- Markdown
- plain text with a few marks that mean formatting
- onion service
- an address that works only through Tor
- PostgreSQL
- the database most of this work was built on
- robots.txt
- the file telling crawlers where not to go
- RSS
- one of the two formats a feed is written in
- screen reader
- software that reads a page aloud, or into braille
- service worker
- a script that answers requests when the network cannot
- sitemap
- a list of a site's pages, written for machines
- static site generator
- a program that writes every page out in advance
- structured data
- facts about a page, written for machines
- Subresource Integrity
- a hash a browser checks a file against
- TLS
- the handshake that encrypts a connection
- Tor
- a network that routes traffic through volunteer relays
- viewport
- the part of a page a window actually shows
- WCAG 2.2
- the accessibility standard this site is held to
- web app manifest
- the file that lets a site be installed
- WebP
- an image format smaller than the ones it replaces
- YAML
- a format for settings a person can still read
