Glossary

Throughout the library there are many obscure terms and abbreviations used, this glossary is here to help make those terms clear.

Protocol

This could mean a few things, but in most contexts used in this library it refers to the method used to do a specific task (i.e. steps taken to connect to a site uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol). It does have another use refering to the connection method used in a browser. Whenever you go to a website you will see something like http:// in front of the url. This is because you are connecting using the http protocol. Other protocols exist like https, ftp, and many more.

HTTP/HTTPS

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) is the protocol that is used to allow connections to websites/webapps. Whenever you go to a website you will see either http:// or https:// in front, because that is what allows you to connect to a site. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (https), is used more commonly these days and is essentially the same as http, except it is encrypted (with SSL, or TLS) to avoid leaking data.

SSL/TLS

Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) are standards by which websites and webapps traffic between server and client are encrypted. It is what allows connections over https, and is considered essential in modern web development. Failure to have a valid SSL or TLS certificate means at minimum the data exchanged over http is vulnerable to attack (can be read in plaintext), and also in many cases sites/apps without it won't be indexed by search engines, or even load in some browsers.

Requests/traffic

Request typically refers to an http request, or the package used in some of the modules that actually creates http requests, called requests. An http request is used to request an http response from a server, which contains the data that a client is looking for. So basically you send a request in order to get a response with your data (i.e. image, webpage etc.). This back and forth request and response is often called traffic.

IP Address

An IP address can be thought of like coordinates, it is the exact "location" where you can "find" a server. Every computer has an IP address, and it can be used to connect to a computer. The way this happens is you use an IP address in conjunction with a port to connect to an app/website. For example if your computer had an IP address of 127.0.0.1, and you were running a web server on port 5000 you could open a browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:5000 to access the site. Typically domains, are just a mask for an IP address. They allow you to type in google.ca instead of 172.217.14.227:80.

Domain/FQDN/PQDN

A domain is a name used to point to a service. For example google.ca is a domain that points to one of google's search engine servers. A domain most commonly is used to allow you to connect to a web service without having to use it's IP address. The domain google.ca (in conjunction with dns records), are what allow you to go to google.ca instead of 172.217.14.227:80. A Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) is the name given to when you write a domain and not a URL. For example https://www.google.ca is a URL, whereas www.google.ca is a FQDN and google.ca is also often called an FQDN, but is technically a Partially Qualified Domain Name (PQDN) or root domain name.

A domain differs from a URL in that a domain in and of itself just says if you own the name or not (going through a Domain Name Registrar). Once you own the domain you will need to setup your dns to have working URL's that people can use.

Subdomains

A subdomain is anything that takes the root domain, and prefixes it. So for example if you have the domain google.ca then you might have the subdomain mail.google.ca for a mail service. Like a regular domain what this is used for depends on the DNS.

DNS

The dns of a domain refers to the set of DNS records, that tell browsers what to do when they go to any URL's associated with your domain. So for example when you go to https://google.ca, the DNS records are pulled up in order to determine where the browser should send people. In this case the browser would see (based on current config), that it should connect to 172.217.14.227:80 in the background while still showing people the https://google.ca URL in their browser.

DNS Records

These are the individual records that make up a domain's configured dns. For example when you connect to https://google.ca, there is an A Record that tells the browser that the IP address of the server is 172.217.14.227 and to connect on the defualt port 80. There is a long list of record types and values that allow for proper conenctions to different types of services, and also are used in many cases in the process of setting up SSL/TLS.

Domain Name Registrar/Registrar

A Domain Name Registrar is a company/organization that allows people to purchase domains. Essentially these companies/organizations keep a list of who owns what domain, and sometimes either does the dns or tells browsers where to go to find the dns.

Metadata

A broad name given to the data surrounding something. For example metadata of a YouTube video might include it's title, or channel name whereas the metadata of a book might be also it's title and author along with it's ISBN etc.

Redirects

A redirect or http redirect is a http response that forwards your http request on to another URL. For example let's say you change the URL an item in an online store from https://example.com/store/items/shoe to https://example.com/store/shoe, you could put a redirect in that sends people from the old URL to the new one.