Glossary

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML: a set of web development techniques that allows web pages to communicate with a server asynchronously without reloading the entire page. Modern implementations typical...

Apple Lossless Audio Codec: a lossless audio compression format developed by Apple. It reduces file size by about 40-60% while preserving bit-perfect audio quality.

Additive Manufacturing File: an XML-based format for 3D printing that supports color, materials, lattices, and constellations (assemblies) unlike STL.

Adaptive Multi-Rate: an audio compression format optimized for speech encoding. Standard in GSM and 3G mobile networks for voice calls.

Monkey's Audio: a lossless audio compression format offering higher compression than FLAC but with slower encoding/decoding. Popular in Asia for archival music storage.

Application Programming Interface: a set of protocols, routines, and tools for building software applications that specifies how software components should interact with each other.

Android Package Kit: the file format for distributing and installing applications on Android devices.

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.