W

W is for WWW

W3C: see World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers):: Like Gopher, a wide area information service, used for accessing Government data.

WAN (Wide-Area Network): A network that serves an area of hundreds or thousands of miles, using common-carrier-provided lines; contrast with LAN. WAN Protocols.

Watt: The electrical unit of power. The rate of energy transfer equivalent to 1 ampere flowing under a pressure of 1 volt at unity power factor.  [DOE Glossary of Electricity Terms]

Watthour (Wh): An electrical energy unit of measure equal to 1 watt of power supplied to, or taken from, an electric circuit steadily for 1 hour.  [DOE Glossary of Electricity Terms]

WDSL Wireless Digital Subscriber Line, utilizes fixed wireless technologies such as MMDS or 802.11. Unlike other forms of DSL, WDSL is a shared medium. Downstream speeds typically starts at 384kbps-1.5M and upstream at 128kbps. See also xDSL.

Web Browser: An application that displays a Web page. Also known as a browser. Internet Explorer and Netscape are examples of web browsers.

Web Page: A HTML document that you open in a web browser that contains text, graphics and small programs called applets, plug-ins, or controls.

Web Quest: A learning activity in which some or all of the information that students interact with comes from sites on the Internet.

Web Server: A computer program that "serves" web sites. A web server specifically is designed to primarily work with the protocol HTTP. One of the first was named httpd, developed at NCSA. Apache, Netscape, and Microsoft IIS are the most popular web servers. See also WWW.

Web Site: A particular place on the World Wide Web devoted to a particular company or subject that has the same Internet address.

Webmaster: A person that creates, maintains, and/or is responsible for a particular web site.

Wheeling Service: The movement of electricity from one system to another over transmission facilities of intervening systems. Wheeling service contracts can be established between two or more systems.  [DOE Glossary of Electricity Terms]

White-hat Hackers: Experts hired to try and defeat security measures as a means to detect security vulnerabilities so they can be corrected.

Wholesale Competition: A system whereby a distributor of power would have the option to buy its power from a variety of power producers, and the power producers would be able to compete to sell their power to a variety of distribution companies. [DOE Glossary of Electricity Terms]

Wholesale Sales: Energy supplied to other electric utilities, cooperatives, municipals, and Federal and State electric agencies for resale to ultimate consumers.  [DOE Glossary of Electricity Terms]

Wholesale Power Market: The purchase and sale of electricity from generators to resellers (who sell to retail customers), along with the ancillary services needed to maintain reliability and power quality at the transmission level.  [DOE Glossary of Electricity Terms]

Wholesale Transmission Services: The transmission of electric energy sold, or to be sold, at wholesale in interstate commerce (from EPACT).  [DOE Glossary of Electricity Terms]

Windows: Collective name for Microsoft's desktop and server operating systems. Includes Windows 2000, Windows NT, and Windows XP.

Windows 2000: Operating system from Microsoft, aka Windows NT 5.0.

Windows DNA (Microsoft® Windows® Distributed interNet Applications Architecture): is an application architecture to fully embrace and integrate the Internet, client/server, and PC models of computing for a new class of distributed computing solutions. The heart of Windows DNA is the integration of Web and client/server application development models through the COM.

Windows NT : (New Technology) Operating system from Microsoft. See also Windows 2000.

Windows XP: (eXPerience) Operating system from Microsoft. Merges Windows 98/Me with Windows 2000.

Winsock (Windows Socket): The standard by which Windows Internet programs communicate with the TCP/IP protocol.

Wires Charge: A broad term which refers to charges levied on power suppliers or their customers for the use of the transmission or distribution wires. [DOE Glossary of Electricity Terms]

Wizard: Similar to guru, although a wizard usually is extremely good at one particular program or computer.

WLAN: Wireless LAN

WML (Wireless Markup Language): is a markup language based on XML, and is intended for use in specifying content and user interface for narrowband devices, including cellular phones and pagers. WML is designed with the constraints of small narrowband devices in mind.

WMS (Work Management System): schedules personnel and other utility resources.

Workstation: A networked personal computing device with more power than standard IBM PC or Macintosh. Typically, a workstation has an operating system such as UNIX that is capable of running several tasks at the same time. However, the line between PCs and workstations are becoming more and more difficult to define.

World Wide Web (WWW): A multimedia Internet service using primarily the HTTP protocol and the HTML language. It is usually referred to simply as “the Web.” The Web is differentiated from gopher and other text-only protocols by its “graphic user interface” (GUI) that allows the joining of text and images on individuals Web pages. Since 1993, it is the largest Internet service. It currently accounts for over 85% of all Internet traffic.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): Organization founded in October 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in collaboration with CERN with support from DARPA and the European Commission. The organization was created to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. W3C has more than 500 Member organizations from around the world. http://www.w3.org See also WWW.

Worm: A computer virus, which replicates itself. The Internet worm was perhaps the most famous; it successfully (and accidentally) duplicated itself on many of the systems across Internet.

WRT: with respect to

WSDL (Web Services Description Language): WSDL is the standard that allows Web services enabled systems to tell each other what capabilities they have and what they can do. Once a system is described in WSDL, developers can create a rich interaction wherever it's needed, plugging in to programs or applications as part of the design process. The system that's providing the Web services doesn't necessarily know about the consuming service, it just serves up what it's told. See also XML, SOAP, and UDDI.

WTLS (Wireless Transport Layer Security): WTLS is the security layer of the WAP, providing privacy, data integrity and authentication for WAP services. It is based on the widely used TLS v1.0 security layer.

WYSIMOLWYG (What You See Is More Or Less What You Get): A common computer industry term for a computer or program which should be WYSIWYG, but does not quite make it. This is not a flattering description.

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get): A computer industry term which indicates that the work you do on your screen will appear exactly the same when you print it on the printer.