Glossary: Letter A

Animated Portable Network Graphics: an extension of the PNG format supporting animated images. It offers better quality and smaller file sizes than animated GIF with full alpha transparency.

macOS Application Bundle: a directory structure appearing as a single file in Finder, containing the executable, resources, frameworks, and metadata.

Archived by Robert Jung: a DOS-era archive format popular in the early 1990s, offering multi-volume archives and good compression for its time.

Address Resolution Protocol: a network protocol used to map an IP address to a physical (MAC) address on a local area network. ARP operates at the data link layer and is essential for communication be...

Sony Alpha Raw: Sony's proprietary RAW image format for Alpha series cameras, based on the TIFF specification.

Advanced Systems Format: a Microsoft container format for streaming audio and video. It is the base format for WMV and WMA files.

Active Server Pages: Microsoft server-side web technology. ASP (Classic) uses VBScript; ASPX (ASP.NET) uses C# or VB.NET with the .NET framework.

Advanced SubStation Alpha: a subtitle format supporting advanced styling, positioning, fonts, colors, and animation effects. Popular in anime fansubbing.

Sun/NeXT Audio: an audio file format from Sun Microsystems commonly used on Unix/Solaris systems. It supports various encodings including PCM and mu-law.

AOMedia Video 1: an open, royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. It offers ~30% better compression than H.265/HEVC and is adopted by Netflix, YouTube, and all major browser...

Audio Video Interleave: a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in 1992. It interleaves audio and video data in a single file using the RIFF container.

AV1 Image File Format: a modern image format based on the AV1 video codec. It offers superior compression over JPEG and WebP with support for HDR, wide color gamut, and transparency.

A domain-specific language for text processing and data extraction. Standard on Unix/Linux systems for pattern scanning and processing of structured text files.

Amazon Web Services: a comprehensive cloud computing platform by Amazon offering over 200 services including compute (EC2), storage (S3), databases (RDS), networking, machine learning, and serverless...

Amazon Kindle Format 8: the e-book format used by modern Kindle devices, supporting HTML5, CSS3, and advanced formatting features beyond MOBI.

The practice of designing and developing websites and web applications that can be used by people with disabilities. Accessibility involves following standards like WCAG to ensure content is perceivab...

A mathematical function applied to a neuron's output in a neural network that introduces non-linearity, enabling the network to learn complex patterns. Common activation functions include ReLU, sigmoi...

Source code for Ada, a structured, statically typed language designed for safety-critical systems in aerospace, defense, and transportation.

An AI design pattern where a language model autonomously plans, executes, and iterates on multi-step tasks using tools, memory, and reasoning. Agentic workflows combine planning, action execution, obs...

An open interchange framework for baked geometric data (animations, simulations). Standard in VFX pipelines for passing cached data between applications.