Internet glossary

A     B     C     D     E     F     G     H     I     J     K     L     M     N     O     P     Q     R     S     T     U     V     W     X     Y     Z

RAID - Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks. Using duplicated disks for error recovery and more efficient operation.

RDF (Resource Definition Framework) - A set of rules (a sort of language) for creating descriptions of information, especially information available on the World Wide Web. RDF could be used to describe a collection of books, or artists, or a collection of web pages as in the RSS data format which uses RDF to create machine-readable summaries of web sites. RDF is also used in XPFE applications to define the relationships between different collections of elements, for example RDF could be used to define the relationship between the data in a database and the way that data is displayed to a user.

Refresh - A meta tag that will let you either periodically refresh the current page or switch to another page.

REST (REpresentational State Transfer) - A loosely defined specification for HTTP-based services where all of the information required to process a request is present in the initial request and where each request receives only a single response, and where the response is in a machine-readable form. An example could be a service that accepts HTTP requests for a search and returns the result as an XML document. Internet glossary.

RGB - Short for the colors red, green, and blue often used in color coding on web pages, particularly for GIF files. 64K color values can be represented by a byte (8 bits of data) each for red, green, and blue. These are commonly expressed in hexadecimal values from 00 too FF for each color. The color value for white in this system is FFFFFF, where each color is at maximum value. Red is FF0000. Yellow is FFFF00. There is a smaller set of non-dithering colors where the permissible values for each color are hexadecimal 00, 33, 66, 99, CC or FF or decimal 0, 51, 102, 153, 204, and 255 and the results will look the same with different browsers, computers, and color cards.

RFC (Request For Comments) - The name of the result and the process for creating a standard on the Internet. New standards are proposed and published on the Internet, as a Request For Comments. The proposal is reviewed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (http://www.ietf.org/), a consensus-building body that facilitates discussion, and eventually a new standard is established, but the reference number/name for the standard retains the acronym RFC, e.g. the official standard for e-mail message formats is RFC 822.

Ring - A network configuration (topology) in which all computers and devices are connected to a circular pathway. Internet glossary.

Router - A special-purpose computer (or software package) that handles the connection between 2 or more Packet-Switched networks. Routers spend all their time looking at the source and destination addresses of the packets passing through them and deciding which route to send them on.

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) - A commonly used protocol for syndication and sharing of content, originally developed to facilitate the syndication of news articles, now widely used to share the contents of blogs. Mashups are often made using RSS feeds. RSS is an XML-based summary of a web site, usually used for syndication and other kinds of content-sharing. There are RSS "feeds" which are sources of RSS information about web sites, and RSS "readers" which read RSS feeds and display their content to users. RSS is being overtaken by a newer, more complex protocol called Atom. Internet glossary.

rtf - Rich Text Format. A text format that allows a lot of specific formatting and layout. Uses the .rtf extension.

RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) - An official Internet standard (RFC 2326) for delivering and receiving streams of data such as audio and video. The standard allows for both real-time ("live") streams of data and streams from stored data.