1.1 Glossary
This document uses the following terms:
ASCII: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is an 8-bit character-encoding scheme based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. ASCII refers to a single 8-bit ASCII character or an array of 8-bit ASCII characters with the high bit of each character set to zero.
big-endian: Multiple-byte values that are byte-ordered with the most significant byte stored in the memory location with the lowest address.
CAB file: See cabinet file.
cabinet file: A file that has the suffix .cab and that acts as a container for other files. It serves as a compressed archive for a group of files. For more information, including the format of CAB files, see [MSDN-CAB].
device driver: The software that the system uses to communicate with a device such as a display, printer, mouse, or communications adapter. An abstraction layer that restricts access of applications to various hardware devices on a given computer system. It is often referred to simply as a "driver".
driver package: A collection of the files needed to successfully load a driver. This includes the device information (.inf) file, the catalog file, and all of the binaries that are copied by the .inf file. Multiple drivers packaged together for deployment purposes.
fully qualified domain name (FQDN): An unambiguous domain name that gives an absolute location in the Domain Name System's (DNS) hierarchy tree, as defined in [RFC1035] section 3.1 and [RFC2181] section 11.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP): An application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems (text, graphic images, sound, video, and other multimedia files) on the World Wide Web.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS): An extension of HTTP that securely encrypts and decrypts web page requests. In some older protocols, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Sockets Layer" is still used (Secure Sockets Layer has been deprecated). For more information, see [SSL3] and [RFC5246].
INF file: A file providing Setup with the information required to set up a device, such as a list of valid logical configurations for the device and the names of driver files associated with the device.
Internet Printing Protocol (IPP): A standard protocol for printing and for the management of print jobs and printer settings over the Internet. It is built on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4): An Internet protocol that has 32-bit source and destination addresses. IPv4 is the predecessor of IPv6.
little-endian: Multiple-byte values that are byte-ordered with the least significant byte stored in the memory location with the lowest address.
NetBIOS: A particular network transport that is part of the LAN Manager protocol suite. NetBIOS uses a broadcast communication style that was applicable to early segmented local area networks. A protocol family including name resolution, datagram, and connection services. For more information, see [RFC1001] and [RFC1002].
print server: A machine that hosts the print system and all its different components.
printer driver: The interface component between the operating system and the printer device. It is responsible for processing the application data into a page description language (PDL) that can be interpreted by the printer device.
proxy: A network node that accepts network traffic originating from one network agent and transmits it to another network agent.
registry: A local system-defined database in which applications and system components store and retrieve configuration data. It is a hierarchical data store with lightly typed elements that are logically stored in tree format. Applications use the registry API to retrieve, modify, or delete registry data. The data stored in the registry varies according to the version of the operating system.
Unicode: A character encoding standard developed by the Unicode Consortium that represents almost all of the written languages of the world. The Unicode standard [UNICODE5.0.0/2007] provides three forms (UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32) and seven schemes (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16 BE, UTF-16 LE, UTF-32, UTF-32 LE, and UTF-32 BE).
Uniform Resource Locator (URL): A string of characters in a standardized format that identifies a document or resource on the World Wide Web. The format is as specified in [RFC1738].
Universal Naming Convention (UNC): A string format that specifies the location of a resource. For more information, see [MS-DTYP] section 2.2.57.
UTF-16LE: The Unicode Transformation Format - 16-bit, Little Endian encoding scheme. It is used to encode Unicode characters as a sequence of 16-bit codes, each encoded as two 8-bit bytes with the least-significant byte first.
web server: A server computer that hosts websites and responds to requests from applications.
MAY, SHOULD, MUST, SHOULD NOT, MUST NOT: These terms (in all caps) are used as defined in [RFC2119]. All statements of optional behavior use either MAY, SHOULD, or SHOULD NOT.