Glossary: Letter W

Web Application Firewall: a security solution that filters, monitors, and blocks HTTP/HTTPS traffic to and from a web application. A WAF protects against common web exploits such as SQL injection, XSS...

Wide Area Network: a telecommunications network that extends over a large geographical area, connecting multiple LANs together. The internet is the largest WAN, while private WANs connect branch offic...

Web Application Archive: a JAR file used to distribute Java web applications, containing servlets, JSP pages, HTML, and configuration files.

Web ARChive: an ISO standard format for storing web crawl data including HTTP headers, page content, and metadata. Used by the Internet Archive and web preservation projects.

WebAssembly: a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine enabling near-native performance in web browsers.

WebAssembly Text Format: the human-readable text representation of WebAssembly binary code using S-expression syntax. Used for debugging and hand-writing WASM modules.

Waveform Audio File Format: a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing raw, uncompressed audio on PCs. It is based on the RIFF container format.

WebGPU Shading Language: the shader language for the WebGPU API, designed for GPU compute and rendering on the web.

Windows Imaging Format: a file-based disk image format used by Microsoft for deploying Windows operating systems and Windows PE.

Well-Known Text: a text markup language for representing geometric objects and coordinate reference systems in GIS applications.

Windows Media Audio: a series of audio codecs developed by Microsoft. It includes lossy, lossless, and voice variants for various audio compression needs.

Windows Metafile: a 16-bit vector graphics format for Windows. It can contain both vector and raster components and is used in Microsoft Office clip art.

Windows Media Video: a series of video codecs and container formats developed by Microsoft. It was widely used for streaming and downloading video in the Windows ecosystem.

Web Open Font Format: a compressed font format designed specifically for web use. It wraps TrueType or OpenType fonts with metadata and compression for faster loading.

Web Open Font Format 2.0: the successor to WOFF using Brotli compression for ~30% better compression. It is the recommended font format for modern web development.

WordPerfect Document: the native document format for Corel WordPerfect, once the dominant word processor before Microsoft Word.

Web Services Description Language: an XML-based language for describing SOAP web service functionality, endpoints, and data types.

A free, open-source lossless audio codec supporting hybrid mode (lossy + correction file). It offers competitive compression with fast encoding/decoding.

A JSON file providing metadata about a Progressive Web App (PWA) including name, icons, start URL, display mode, and theme colors.

A set of web platform APIs that allow developers to create reusable, encapsulated custom HTML elements. Web Components consist of Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, and HTML Templates, enabling framework-ag...