Managing Interactive Media Glossary: F

Glossary: F (17 entries found)

fair dealing or fair use: In copyright law, an exception to infringement under certain limited circumstances because your usage of the material is very slight and/or under circumstances where free usage is seen as reasonable. Examples of this include use of extracts from books in a review and limited use in education. What constitutes fair use differs from country to country and is often misunderstood.
feature creep: A gradual and insidious increase in the capability of a piece of software as it is developed, usually without any overall plan of implementation.
field trials: The use of the product in situ with the intended users prior to release to identify problems for correction.
file path: The combination of disc or volume name, directory names and file name that uniquely identifies a file on a computer.
firewall: In networks, a computer which monitors traffic flowing between the Internet and an internal network so as to prevent unwanted connections.
fixed-term contract: A contract that cannot be extended beyond its original duration without positive action being taken by both parties. To extend the term either a new contract would be written or a new clause added to the original contract.
Flash: A vector-based animation technology developed by Macromedia (now part of Adobe). Allows sophisticated interaction in a web page with minimal data and can be used to produce entire self-contained sites. Can also include video and audio.
flow chart: A diagram that shows step-by-step progression through the content blocks of the proposed website or program.
focus groups: See concept testing.
force majeure: A condition in a contract where neither party has control over the circumstances. This might include war, loss of electrical power and acts of God.
formative: A term used to describe evaluation processes carried out during the development cycle. These are contrasted with summative evaluation processes, which occur at the end of development. In this context, team review meetings that occur during the project could be called a formative evaluation process. See also summative.
FQDN: Fully Qualified Domain Name. See domain name.
frame-grabbing: Synonymous with digitization of video but dating back to the days when computers had to digitize frames individually.
frames: In video a complete single image, which forms part of a moving sequence of images. On the web, a technique that allows several distinct parts of a web page to be defined, and which can be operated separately by the viewer. Usually used to allow an index to be shown alongside the different items referred to in it.
front-end: A computer program that provides interface and set-up procedures for a less user-friendly, but probably more powerful, back-end program. On a web server this might be the program that formats web pages having drawn information from a back-end database.
FTP: File Transfer Protocol, protocol for transferring files between computers over the Internet.
functional specification: The document that says how an application works. The application will be written by referring to this document.