Internet & Web Abbreviations
76 abbreviations · part of Technology & Computer Abbreviations
Abbreviations from the World Wide Web and web development: addresses and domains (URL, TLD), markup and styling languages (HTML, CSS), browser technologies (DOM, AJAX, WebRTC), rendering approaches (SPA, SSR, SSG), performance metrics such as Core Web Vitals, accessibility standards, and the bodies that publish web standards, such as the W3C and WHATWG.
| Abbreviation | Stands for | Description |
|---|---|---|
| .com | Commercial (top-level domain) | The most popular top-level domain, originally intended for commercial organizations but open to anyone worldwide. |
| .edu | Education (top-level domain) | A sponsored top-level domain restricted to accredited post-secondary institutions in the United States, such as harvard.edu. |
| .gov | Government (top-level domain) | A sponsored top-level domain reserved for US government organizations, including federal agencies, states, cities, counties and tribal governments. |
| .net | Network (top-level domain) | A generic top-level domain originally meant for network infrastructure such as ISPs and hosting providers, now open to anyone. |
| .org | Organization (top-level domain) | A generic top-level domain originally meant for noncommercial organizations, such as charities, open-source projects and community groups, but open to anyone without… |
| a11y | Accessibility | A numeronym in which the number 11 replaces the eleven letters between the "a" and "y" of "accessibility". |
| AJAX | Asynchronous JavaScript and XML | A technique for updating parts of a web page by exchanging data with the server in the background, without a full page reload. |
| AMP | Accelerated Mobile Pages | An open-source framework launched by Google in 2015 for building fast mobile pages with restricted HTML and limited JavaScript, cached and served from Google's servers. |
| ARIA | Accessible Rich Internet Applications | A W3C specification of HTML attributes, such as role, aria-label and aria-expanded, that tell screen readers what custom widgets are and what state they are in. |
| ASP | Active Server Pages | Microsoft's server-side scripting technology, released in 1996, for generating dynamic web pages on its IIS web server, usually with VBScript. |
| BBS | Bulletin board system | A computer that users dialed into with a modem to read and post messages, download files and play text games; a forerunner of web forums and social media in the 1980s… |
| BEM | Block Element Modifier | A CSS class-naming methodology that names components as blocks, their parts as elements and variations as modifiers, as in card, card__title and card--featured. |
| ccTLD | Country code top-level domain | A two-letter top-level domain assigned to a country or territory, based mostly on ISO 3166 codes, such as .uk, .de, .jp and .ca. |
| CDN | Content delivery network | A network of servers in many locations that caches and serves website files, images, video and software downloads from a point close to each user, cutting load times… |
| CGI | Common Gateway Interface | An early standard way for a web server to run an external program, such as a Perl or C script, and send its output to the browser as a web page. |
| CLS | Cumulative Layout Shift | A Core Web Vitals metric that scores how much visible content unexpectedly moves while a page loads, such as text jumping when an ad or image appears above it. |
| CMS | Content management system | Software that lets people create, edit and publish website content through an admin interface without writing code. |
| CORS | Cross-Origin Resource Sharing | A browser mechanism that lets a server declare, through HTTP headers such as Access-Control-Allow-Origin, which other websites may read its responses with JavaScript. |
| CSP | Content Security Policy | An HTTP response header that tells the browser which sources of scripts, styles, images and other content a page may load, blocking injected code that does not match. |
| CSR | Client-side rendering | Building a page's content in the browser with JavaScript after downloading a minimal HTML shell and the app's code. |
| CSS | Cascading Style Sheets | The style sheet language that controls how HTML is displayed: colors, fonts, spacing, layout, animation and responsive behavior across screen sizes. |
| CWV | Core Web Vitals | Google's set of three user-experience metrics for web pages: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness and Cumulative Layout… |
| DOM | Document Object Model | The tree of objects that browsers build from an HTML or XML document, with nodes for each element, attribute and piece of text. |
| ES6 | ECMAScript 6 | The 2015 edition of the ECMAScript standard behind JavaScript and the largest update in the language's history. |
| FCP | First Contentful Paint | A page-load metric marking the moment the browser first renders any text, image or other content, telling the user the page is actually loading. |
| FID | First Input Delay | A former Core Web Vitals metric that measured the delay between a user's first interaction, such as a click, and the moment the browser could begin handling it. |
| FOUC | Flash of unstyled content | A brief moment when a web page appears as raw, unstyled HTML before its CSS loads and applies. |
| gTLD | Generic top-level domain | A top-level domain not tied to a country, such as .com, .org and .net, along with newer names like .shop, .app and .bank. |
| HLS | HTTP Live Streaming | Apple's adaptive streaming protocol that splits video into short segments listed in .m3u8 playlists at several quality levels, so players switch bitrate as network… |
| HTML | HyperText Markup Language | The standard markup language for web pages, describing structure and meaning with elements written as tags, such as headings, paragraphs, links, images, forms and tables. |
| HTML5 | HyperText Markup Language 5 | The fifth major revision of HTML, finalized as a W3C Recommendation in October 2014, which added native audio and video, the canvas element, semantic tags such as… |
| IDN | Internationalized domain name | A domain name containing characters beyond basic ASCII, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic or accented Latin letters. |
| iframe | Inline frame | An HTML element that embeds another web page inside the current one, used for YouTube videos, maps, payment forms and ads. |
| INP | Interaction to Next Paint | A Core Web Vitals metric measuring how quickly a page visibly responds to clicks, taps and key presses, reported as roughly the slowest interaction during a visit. |
| ISR | Incremental static regeneration | A Next.js feature that rebuilds individual static pages in the background after a set time or on demand, so a site keeps the speed of static HTML while picking up… |
| Jamstack | JavaScript, APIs and Markup | A web architecture in which pages are prebuilt as static files and served from a CDN, with dynamic features supplied by JavaScript calling APIs and third-party services. |
| JS | JavaScript | The programming language of web browsers, used to make pages interactive, update content without reloading, validate forms and build full applications. |
| JSP | JavaServer Pages | A Java technology for building dynamic web pages by mixing HTML with Java code and special tags, compiled into servlets that run on servers such as Apache Tomcat. |
| JSX | JavaScript XML | A syntax extension that lets developers write HTML-like markup directly inside JavaScript, used mainly with React to describe user interfaces. |
| LAMP | Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP | A classic open-source web server stack: the Linux operating system, the Apache HTTP Server, the MySQL database and PHP, sometimes Perl or Python, for application code. |
| LCP | Largest Contentful Paint | A Core Web Vitals metric measuring how long it takes for the largest image or text block in the viewport to render after a page starts loading. |
| MDN | MDN Web Docs (formerly Mozilla Developer Network) | The most widely used free reference for web developers, documenting HTML, CSS, JavaScript and browser APIs, with compatibility tables showing which browsers support… |
| MEAN | MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node.js | A full-stack JavaScript web development stack: the MongoDB database, the Express.js server framework, the Angular front-end framework and the Node.js runtime. |
| MERN | MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js | A JavaScript stack combining the MongoDB database, the Express.js server framework, the React front-end library and the Node.js runtime. |
| MIME | Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions | A standard that labels content with a type, such as text/html, image/png or application/json, and lets emails carry attachments, multiple parts and non-English text. |
| MPA | Multi-page application | A traditional website or web app in which each navigation loads a new HTML document from the server. |
| OG | Open Graph (protocol) | A set of meta tags, such as og:title, og:description and og:image, that control how a web page looks when shared as a link preview on social media and messaging apps. |
| PWA | Progressive web app | A website built with modern browser features so it can be installed on a phone or desktop, open in its own window, work offline and send push notifications, much like a… |
| RSS | Really Simple Syndication | An XML feed format that lets websites publish lists of their latest articles or episodes so readers and apps can collect updates automatically. |
| Sass | Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets | A CSS preprocessor that adds variables, nesting, mixins, functions and partial files, then compiles to ordinary CSS that browsers understand. |
| SCSS | Sassy CSS | The main syntax of the Sass preprocessor, written with curly braces and semicolons like regular CSS, so any valid CSS file is also valid SCSS. |
| SLD | Second-level domain | The part of a domain name directly to the left of the top-level domain, such as "example" in example.com. |
| SOP | Same-origin policy | The browser's core security rule that a script loaded by one origin, meaning the combination of scheme, host and port, cannot read data belonging to another origin. |
| SPA | Single-page application | A web app that loads one HTML page and then updates content with JavaScript as the user navigates, fetching data from APIs instead of requesting new pages from the… |
| SRI | Subresource Integrity | A browser feature that checks a script or stylesheet loaded from a CDN against a cryptographic hash written in the page's HTML, refusing to use the file if it has been… |
| SSE | Server-sent events | A browser API that keeps an HTTP connection open so the server can push a stream of text events to the page, such as live scores, notifications or chatbot replies… |
| SSG | Static site generation | Building every page of a website into plain HTML files at build time, so they can be served instantly from a CDN without any server code running per request. |
| SSR | Server-side rendering | Generating a page's HTML on the server for each request, so the browser receives ready-to-display content instead of an empty shell that JavaScript fills in. |
| TLD | Top-level domain | The last part of a domain name after the final dot, such as .com, .org, .uk or .app. |
| TTFB | Time to first byte | The time between a browser requesting a page and receiving the first byte of the response, covering DNS lookup, connection setup, TLS negotiation and the server's… |
| UA | User agent | Software acting on a user's behalf on the web, most often a browser. |
| URI | Uniform Resource Identifier | A string that identifies a resource by location, by name, or both. |
| URL | Uniform Resource Locator | The address of a resource on the web, such as https://www.example.com/products?id=42. |
| URN | Uniform Resource Name | A URI that names a resource persistently without saying where to find it, using the form urn:namespace:identifier, such as urn:uuid followed by a UUID. |
| W3C | World Wide Web Consortium | The international standards organization that develops web specifications such as CSS, the WCAG accessibility guidelines, SVG and WebAuthn. |
| WAI | Web Accessibility Initiative | The W3C program that develops accessibility guidelines and resources, including WCAG for web content, ARIA for rich applications, and guidelines for authoring tools and… |
| WASM | WebAssembly | A compact binary instruction format that browsers run at near-native speed alongside JavaScript, letting code written in C, C++, Rust, Go and other languages run on web… |
| WCAG | Web Content Accessibility Guidelines | The W3C's international guidelines for making websites and apps usable by people with disabilities, covering text alternatives, keyboard access, color contrast… |
| WebDAV | Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning | An extension of HTTP that lets users create, edit, move and lock files on a web server, so a remote server can be mounted like a network drive. |
| WebGL | Web Graphics Library | A JavaScript API for rendering hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D graphics inside a browser canvas without plug-ins. |
| WebRTC | Web Real-Time Communication | A set of browser APIs and protocols for real-time audio, video and data exchange directly between browsers, with no plug-ins. |
| WHATWG | Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group | The community that maintains core web platform standards, including HTML, DOM, Fetch, URL and Streams, as continuously updated "living standards". |
| WP | WordPress | The open-source content management system behind a large share of websites, from blogs to news and e-commerce sites. |
| WWW | World Wide Web | The system of interlinked hypertext pages, images and other resources reached through browsers using URLs and HTTP. |
| XHR | XMLHttpRequest | A browser API that lets JavaScript send HTTP requests and receive responses without reloading the page; it powered the AJAX era. |
| XHTML | Extensible HyperText Markup Language | A reformulation of HTML as XML that requires well-formed markup, with lowercase tags, quoted attributes and every element closed. |
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