Hot diggity dank!
Unraveling the vocabulary in PC patter
June 21, 1996
Web posted at: 12:40 a.m. EDTFrom Correspondent Jeanne Moos
NEW YORK (CNN) -- You might be disconnected if:
- You still think of Windows as something to hang curtains on ...
- If you insist that a Web is what a spider leaves behind ...
- If surfing the 'Net is "byte-ing" off more than you can chew.
If you're reading this story, we'll assume that you managed to get to CNN Interactive on the World Wide Web without the help of your resident teen-ager. As you know from our TV spots, our address is CNN-dot-com.
Don't know what the dot is? What about com? Computer inexpert Jeanne Moos headed to New York's Personal Computer Expo Thursday to get professional assistance. Why do you need dots everywhere, she demanded, and what is dot com?
"Dot" is a separator. "Com" is short for commercial. Hope somebody's told David Letterman that there's a limit to the number of dots he can have in his e-mail address.
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If you're looking for the White House Web site, you type in dot-gov (.gov), not dot com. "Gov" is of course the abbreviation for government in the White House's address, or URL. "Org" is of course for organization, as in the American Medical Association or the Internet Movie Database. And any address containing "edu" links to the site for an educational institution.
URL? That stands for Uniform Resource Locator. You'll see lots of WWWs in URLs -- even the kids at the New York Public Library know that WWW stands for World Wide Web.
Despite what Letterman said on "Larry King Live (1.2M QuickTime movie)," neither "diggity" nor "dank" is a standard part of anybody's address.
But you will certainly see a lot of "http" at the beginning of these addresses, for "hyper-text transfer protocol."
Don't let anybody tell you different. We met a guy who looked informed; he was wearing his company's Web address on his back. But his explanation of h.t.t.p. was w.r.o.n.g. "HTTP is an acronym for hitting on the page itself," he claimed. "Hit is HT, TP for The Page."
The colon is attached to the http, then a slash, then another. Why two slashes? The woman who answered all our other questions could only laugh at this one.
Sure, go ahead and laugh, we told her. You'll need those two backslashes to get to fascinating Web sites such as hillaryshair.com. There really is a Web site featuring the hairdos of the first lady. If you only knew a thing or two about Web addresses, you too could vote for the hairdo of your choice.
Computer whizzes make fun of those people who avoid computers as if they were a virus. At the PC Expo they were passing around the story about the ill-informed customer who broke his CD tray because he thought it was for holding a coffee cup.
But we don't expect them to understand. For the PC Expo folks who loaded the new Power Goo software onto their Pentium PCs, there's something alien on computers. For others of us, there's just something alien about computers.
Related stories:
- Squish and twist with 'Power Goo' - June 7, 1996
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