Reference & Manual > Glossary > G

Gateway
The technical meaning is a hardware or software set-up that translates between two dissimilar protocols, for example Prodigy has a gateway that translates between its internal, proprietary e-mail format and Internet e-mail format. Another, sloppier meaning of gateway is to describe any mechanism for providing access to another system, e.g. AOL might be called a gateway to the Internet.

Gateway Page
A gateway page is a sub page of a website that caters to a specific audience; either by providing information addressing the needs of that audience, or by aggregating information by subject/topic.

GIF
(Graphics Interchange Format) A graphic file format invented by Compuserve. One of the most widely used formats for internet and web. Uses a lossless compression method, thus ensuring that the quality of the image is not lowered.

Gigabyte (GB)
In data communications, a gigabyte is one billion bytes (1,073,741,824 bytes to be exact). Byte - a group of eight binary digits processed as a unit by a computer and used especially to represent an alphanumeric character.

Global Navigation
'Global' or 'persistent' navigation is navigation that is displayed on every webpage (usually at the top of the screen). This form of navigation typically provides access to the main content sections. In this way, top-level navigation is similar supermarket signage-it helps to orient the user.

Gopher
Widely successful method of making menus of material available over the Internet. Gopher is a Client and Server style program, which requires that the user have a Gopher Client program. Although Gopher spread rapidly across the globe in only a couple of years, it has been largely supplanted by Hypertext, also known as WWW (World Wide Web) . There are still thousands of Gopher Servers on the Internet and we can expect they will remain for a while.

Graphical User Interface (GUI)
A way of interacting with the computer that relies on graphical symbols. Most often requires a mouse. It is less powerful then the command-line interface, but is more user friendly and is easier to learn for users without technical background.