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What is Wi-Fi, URL, WWW and API: complex glossary of technological abbreviations

  • April 16, 2023
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24 Channels has put together some of the most popular abbreviations that we often use to explain their meanings. URL address URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. Depending

24 Channels has put together some of the most popular abbreviations that we often use to explain their meanings.

URL address

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. Depending on your experience, chances are you’ve never heard someone say the entire sentence of this acronym out loud. This speaks to how fundamental this concept is to the structure of the modern world.

As the name suggests, a URL identifies the location of any resource that “live” on the Internet, including servers and websites. We use these to tell our crawlers where to go to get to the right site.

URLs are “combined” because they have the same structure. This is the same building address that tells the postal service where to deliver your mail.

LTE

When you use mobile internet, you may notice a small logo indicating that your phone is on LTE. It literally means “Long Term Evolution”.

LTE is one of many wireless communication standards (for example, mobile). As they expand the use of mobile phones and other wireless devices, telecommunications companies are forced to increase the bandwidth of their systems, both in terms of speed and the number of devices the network can serve.

In practice, LTE is a cross between 3G and 4G (which we’ll come to, just be patient). In other words, when LTE was developed, it was only one step in the “long-term evolution” of telephony standards.

API

When Twitter says it will start charging for its API or OpenAI says it won’t steal data from people using the ChatGPT API, what are they talking about?

API stands for “application programming interface”. This is the way two computer programs (aka smartphone apps) communicate with each other.

Let’s take Facebook for example. It is a huge network of interconnected systems consisting of millions of lines of code. This system is complex to say the least. Not only is it complex, it contains many trade secrets, and the company undergoes constant internal changes as they work on it and create new things.

Developers want to connect their apps to other apps for a variety of reasons, but they need to do so in a simple way that won’t leak secrets or break when an engineer modifies a line of code. This is where APIs come into play.

Continuing the Facebook example, the company’s APIs do pretty much everything: connect to Facebook’s advertising system, allow other apps to post to the platform, and allow third parties to access users’ friend lists (with their permission, of course).

2G, 3G, 4G, 5G

Some people think “G” stands for gigahertz, but it’s actually “generation,” so you’ve never heard of 1G. In fact, this technology required no special terminology until we started developing it.

These generations again belong to the standards used in wireless cellular technologies. We continue to create more wireless devices that use more data and require faster data transfers, but there is a strict limit to what our systems can handle.

When 5G technology emerged, the telecommunications industry made noise that it would revolutionize the world, leading to “smart cities” where everything would be connected. Unfortunately for those who believe in the hype, that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon.

The introduction of 5G has been a flashpoint for conspiracy theories that were pretty ridiculous from the start. If this is the new normal, get used to it because it’s a never ending process. People have already started working on 6G.

wifi

Although its name comes from hi-fi, meaning “high fidelity data transmission,” Wi-Fi is not an acronym for “wireless communication.” In fact, it is not a contraction at all. Wi-Fi is a registered name and Wi-Fi is a registered trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, a technology trade group.

HTML

You are currently reading a web page written using a lot of HTML. We say “HTML” to avoid typing “Hyper Text Markup Language”.

HTML is a simple system that tells the browser how to display that web page. It’s “hypertext” as opposed to regular “text” because you can use all kinds of cool colors and fonts, and add videos and images. It “places” the page, tells you “where to put these words” or “where to put these pictures” and gives them a certain dimension.

HTTP to HTTPS

HTTP stands for “Hypertext Transfer Protocol”. As we just learned, hypertext creates the content of web pages and tells browsers how to display it. But your browser also needs a way to request a copy of all this and more.

HTTP is the language used by browsers and servers to communicate and send files.

HTTP allows your browser to say “Hello, I’m a browser and I’m looking for this particular website”. The server responds, “Hello browser, I’m the host. The website you’re looking for is here.” And all this is due to the fact that these files are written using a standardized system such as HTML.

The problem with HTTP is that it is not encrypted, so a new secure protocol was developed by adding the letter “s” meaning “secure” to the end.

HTTPS It allows browsers and servers to send encrypted information back and forth so that anyone who catches it in the middle can’t see the content. Security enthusiasts have gradually forced the Internet to adopt HTTPS, and today around 80% of all websites use it.

What is the World Wide Web or WWW?

In the early days of the consumer Internet, you had to type “www”. before each URL. You probably know that it stands for “World Wide Web”. However, you may not know that the World Wide Web and the Internet are not exactly the same thing, even though the words “Internet” and “web” are used interchangeably.

In the late 1960s, the US military began working on a system that would allow different computers to work together at the same time. Everyone agreed it was a great idea, and before long governments, companies, and academics began working on their own systems that eventually together made up the Internet.

To be truly useful, these systems had to work together, so the world needed a standardized way for computers to communicate. The World Wide Web was created in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee. The World Wide Web was created. It was designed as a system that allows computers to use a web browser to access documents and files stored on servers on the Internet, and to communicate in a seamless and interoperable way so that everyone can improve each other’s work. It includes a number of different standards, including the aforementioned HTML, HTTP, and URLs.

SMS

SMS is an acronym for Short Message Service, which was the first cell phone system to allow text messages to be sent to each other. You may have also heard of the big brother MMS or Multimedia Messaging Service that allows sharing pictures and group texts.

The first “Merry Christmas” message was sent on December 3, 1992. We still use SMS today, and that’s too bad because it has serious flaws.

When two iPhones text each other, they communicate using the encrypted iMessage protocol. Newer Android phones have mostly switched to RCS (Rich Communication Services), which allows for end-to-end encryption and many other useful features. But when iPhone and Android users send text messages to each other, they are sent via legacy unencrypted SMS, leaving users vulnerable.

RSS

Have you noticed that there is a lot of stuff on the internet? In fact, there is so much information on websites today that it can be difficult for one person to keep track of it all! People have been trying to figure out what to do with all this for a long time. One of the first ideas was RSS, which stands for RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, depending on who you ask.

RSS allows content producing websites to create a custom content feed. People can enter the address of this feed into a tool called RSS reader which will collect all this content in one place with appropriate automatic updates. For a while, RSS seemed to be gaining momentum, and many of the biggest companies behind the Internet were backing it.

Unfortunately, the Internet is run by tech companies that want the web to make money, not a group of benevolent visionaries who want the web to be great. RSS didn’t fit with many companies’ strategies, and one of the biggest tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even Mozilla, stopped supporting it. But there has recently been a push to revive RSS, and Google actually added an RSS reader to Chrome for Android in 2021.

Source: 24 Tv

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