Site Glossary
For accessibility, some pages have their own glossary. This goes as follows:
- Assistive Tools
- Hardware or software that helps people with disabilities. The most well-known examples are screen readers, used by low-vision individuals. Websites can include specialised code to support these tools and improve accessibility.
- Barrel-eye
- A family of deep-sea fish, typically found in the mesopelagic zone, known for their transparent heads and upward-facing tubular eyes.
- Backend
- The hidden side of a website that handles its data and logic. Its opposite is the frontend, which is the part users directly interact with.
- Blue hour
- The brief period after sunset or before sunrise when the sky adopts deep blue tones.
- Detritus
- Fragments from destroyed material, especially resulting from decomposition.
- Digital Garden
- A website characterised by the continuous, indefinite upkeep of its pages, comparable to the pruning of plants in a garden.
- Dot-Com crash
- A term for the bursting of the Dot-Com speculative bubble, which happened in 2000.
- Dracula Dark Theme
- A dark theme created by Zeno Rocha in 2013, originally designed for code editors and terminals. Despite its high-contrast palette of deep purples and pastel highlights, it is widely praised for its readability. Since its creation, Dracula has expanded to many other applications, including browsers, chat clients, and more.
- Dungeon-crawler
- A video-game genre that revolves around first-person dungeon exploration.
- Extremities
- The furthest points of a thing; in this context, it refers to fingers.
- Grotesque
- A statue on the side of a church, chapel, or cathedral believed to have protective qualities. If fitted with a water spout, it is called a gargoyle.
- Instant Net
- A term for the modern internet, highlighting its fast-paced nature. A play on “Instant Noodles” and a reference to the essay The Slow Web by Zach Cheng.
- Low-Latency
- Software that responds swiftly to user inputs. A website that loads quickly can be classed as Low Latency.
- Lycanthropy
- The state of being a werewolf.
- Morningstar
- A medieval European club weapon ending in a spiked ball; when the ball is attached by a chain, it becomes a flail.
- Obelisk
- A tapered stone pillar with a pointed top.
- Phantasmagoria
- A strange and unsettling sequence of images, like those seen in a dream.
- Rugae
- The anatomical term for a living being’s stomach lining.
- Safe-word
- An agreed-upon word used to signal the pausing or stopping of an activity, primarily to ensure safety.
- Sadgrl Layout
- A static website generator created by the eponymous Sadgrl. Its ease of use made it especially popular with less experienced coders, most prominently on Neocities.
- Snarl Words
- Words designed to override counterarguments and provoke strong emotional responses. A snarl word is a type of ad hominem fallacy: an attack on a person’s character rather than on their argument. An example is “Puritan,” in reference to Protestant Puritans and their strict religious practices. By labeling their opponent as a “Puritan,” the speaker casts them as censorious, prudish, and potentially religiously motivated. The term was first published by S.I. Hayakawa in 1949.
- Static Website
- A website comprised of HTML, CSS, and uncomplicated JavaScript. A website stops being static when it uses anything beyond these three, such as backends or databases.
- Stewardship
- The job of caring for a thing given to you.
- Thought-terminating clichés
- Fallacious phrases designed to discourage critical thinking or end conversations. These “thought-stoppers” use appeals to emotion, loaded questions, minimisation, tu quoques, and other deceptive tactics to do so. An example is “Let people enjoy things.” By saying “Let people enjoy things,” the speaker casts their adversary as a habitual contrarian rather than a thoughtful observer. This phrase is fallacious because it uses a Strawman Argument, misrepresenting the other party’s argument to make it easier to attack. The term “Strawman” refers to a literal straw figure, and like its corporeal counterpart, it lacks a solid body. The term was first coined by Robert Jay Lifton in 1961.
- Web Revivalism
- A term for the adoption of millennium-era web design. Web Revivalists create simplistic static sites, use period-appropriate software, and attempt to emulate the lifestyles of early internet users. It was first coined by MelonKing in 2022 in his essay “Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival?”.
- Webcomic
- A comic that is published online rather than in traditional print. Webcomics are often drawn by individual authors and can take years, if not decades, to complete.