Monday, September 23, 2002		ITerminology

Bread crumbs: A Website navigation technique. Bread crumbs typically appear horizontally near the top of a Web page, providing links back to each previous page that the user navigates through in order to get to the current page. Basically, they provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting and entry point of a Website and may look something like this - home page-section page-sub section page. This technique is also referred to breadcrumb trail.

Metcalfe’s Law: A theory argued by Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, which states that the power of a network increases by the square of the number of nodes connected to it. For example, where X is the number of nodes, the power of the network is X squared. Metcalfe observed that new technologies are valuable only when large numbers of people use them — consider how less valuable the telephone would be if only two people in the world used them. The network becomes more valuable the more nodes that are connected to it.

@ sign: Pronounced at sign or simply as at, this symbol is used in e-mail addressing to separate the user’s name from the user’s domain name, both of which are necessary in order to transmit e-mails. For example, the e-mail address webmaster@webopedia. com indicates that the user named Webmaster receives e-mail "at," or "@," the webopedia.com domain.

Haxie: Formed from the combination of the words hack and Mac OS X, a haxie is a hack specifically designed for use with the Mac OS X operating system. The term was coined by software company, Unsanity.