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Glossary
Alt text

Alt text

Alt text, short for alternative text, refers to text that describes online images. This description provides people with visual disabilities detailed explanations of an image’s content, context, and purpose. 

When people with visual disabilities access a website or social media platform, screen reader technologies built into their devices or operating systems read the alt text aloud. This feature ensures visual content is accessible to a broader audience.

Alt text also improves search engine optimization (SEO) by giving context to images, helping search engines understand the image content, and increasing website visibility in search results. 

Learn more about alt text for images, how to make your site more accessible, and tools to help enhance visual designs.

Relevant courses

Webflow Ecommerce

Learn how to build and design your Webflow Ecommerce store. Customize every detail and launch a fully functional online store — without writing code.

Manage dynamic content with the Webflow CMS

Learn how to create, manage, and display dynamic content across your site using the Webflow CMS.

Getting started with Webflow Enterprise

Get familiar with Webflow’s website experience platform and Enterprise features.

CSS grid in Webflow

An overview of CSS grid. Use the grid layout in Webflow to get more control over your designs and create powerful, responsive layouts — faster.

Getting started with Webflow

Get familiar with Webflow’s website experience platform.

CSS layout & positioning

Dig into the world of HTML and CSS layouts — learn how they work together and get an overview of display properties like inline block and flexbox.

Other glossary terms

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States dropdown menu

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The dropdown menu to the right of the Selector field that allows you to access and change the styles of an element when it is hovered, pressed, or focused.

Jank

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Jank describes subpar functionality in a web interface that hinders or disrupts user activity.

Site

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What you create in Webflow! You can publish sites to a webflow.io staging subdomain for free, export the code on a paid plan, add hosting on any paid plan, or add a Site plan to any site to connect your custom domain and unlock hosting features.

Browser

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A browser, or web browser, is a software program that allows users to access, navigate, and interact with websites on the internet.

Asynchronous

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Asynchronous programming is an approach where programs simultaneously run multiple operations independently without waiting for previous tasks to complete.

Language code

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A language code is a standardized code of letters and numbers that represent different languages.

Cloneable site

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Cloneable sites are open source (made available under the CC0 (“no rights reserved”) license). When you enable cloning, you allow any user to copy, modify, and use any part of your site for personal or commercial purposes.Sites with cloning turned off do not give others access to copy your site or open it in the Designer.

Abstraction

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In object-oriented programming (OOP), abstraction conceals irrelevant details so they don’t interfere with the task at hand.

Widget

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A widget is an interactive element embedded in a user interface that facilitates specific user actions or displays important information at a glance.

Meta keywords

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Meta keywords are words or phrases you can include in your web page's metadata.

Bad neighborhood

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Bad neighborhoods are groups of websites that search engines have downgraded because they violate search engine guidelines.

Display: inline

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The display: inline CSS property is a display option that controls an element’s appearance and layout.

Interpolation

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Interpolation is a mathematical process that estimates and creates new values based on known values and their relationship.

Breadcrumb

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A breadcrumb, or breadcrumb trail, is a navigational element representing a user’s current location within a website's hierarchical structure.

Folder settings

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Allows you to manage your folders.

Optimization

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Optimization is a systematic approach to improve a website's appearance, functionality, and visual appeal to enhance the user experience, improve search engine rankings, and achieve business objectives.

Content management system (CMS)

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A content management system (CMS) is a tool for creating and managing a website and its content.

Parent

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The element directly above in the hierarchy tree.

Basic section

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A section of the Add panel that contains the elements that act as a website's fundamental building blocks (e.g., div block, list, button, etc.).

Navbar

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A navbar, or navigation bar, is an interactive user element with a menu or a set of links to a website’s main sections.

Character encoding

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Character encoding is the process of representing characters (such as “a” or “3”) in a particular way, such as text on a computer screen.

Return on investment (ROI)

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Return on investment (ROI) is a metric evaluating the profitability or gain of a venture.

Switch field

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Available in CMS Collections. This field offers you a powerful filtering tool for Collection items. For example, you could create a switch labeled "Featured?" for Blog Posts, and then switch on the toggle to showcase particular posts.

Robots.txt

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A robots.txt file instructs search engine crawlers which webpages and sections they can or can't crawl and index.

Text block

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A typography element that is used when no other element is specifically suitable.

Inheritance

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Inheritance describes a principle where child elements adopt the style properties of parent elements.

Borders

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The CSS border property delineates an HTML element.

Baseline

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The baseline is the fixed invisible line that serves as the base for letters. It’s used as a measurement for line height and x-height.

Hyperlink

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Hyperlinks are clickable elements that allow users to navigate between web pages, documents, or other types of digital content.

Inline Frame (iframe)

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An inline frame is an HTML element that embeds an HTML document within another webpage.

Application context

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An application context is a set of data that identifies an application’s tasks, where those tasks originate, and how those tasks are configured.

Maximum height (max height)

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The “max-height” CSS property defines an element’s maximum height.

Button

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A button is an interactive element that facilitates user actions.

Style Manager

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The third tab in the right-side panel where you can rename element classes, preview your class and tag styles, search for classes and tags, and delete any classes that aren’t in use.

Prefetch

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Prefetch is a technique that proactively loads and caches resources to improve website performance and user experience.

Slug

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A slug, also known as a URL slug or a website slug, is descriptive text that appears at the end of a URL and identifies a web page.

Flex-align

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A flexbox property that lets you customize the alignment behavior of flex children, based on the cross-axis of the flex container. The cross axis is the opposite of the flex-direction property, so if you set the direction to vertical, the cross axis is horizontal. Options include start, center, end, baseline, and stretch.

RSS

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Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a web format that automatically distributes frequently updated content to subscribers, eliminating the need for subscribers to check the website manually to stay up to date.

Image field

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Available in CMS Collections. With this field, you can upload images from your computer and use them as dynamic items in your individual Collection item.

Adobe Fonts API token

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An Adobe Fonts API token protects and supports your data from Adobe Fonts with other programs you may be using to personalize your website’s fonts.

Head code

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Custom code that's added just before the closing </head> tag in your site's HTML file. Learn more about custom code in head and body tags.

Class

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A class is a template that defines variables for objects with similar properties.

Sitemap URL

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The location your sitemap is stored in relation to your site, and what’s used when submitting your sitemap to search engines.

Python

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Python is a high-level, object-oriented, general-purpose programming language (GPL).

Certificate authority

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A certificate authority (CA), also known as a certification authority, issues digital certificates that verify a website’s owner.

Media query

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A media query is a CSS technique that applies different styles to a website or an app based on the characteristics of the device displaying it, such as screen size, resolution, and browser viewport.

Alt text

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Alt text, short for alternative text, refers to text that describes online images.

Node title

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The type of element you're working with, i.e., H1, link, button, etc.

Custom font

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A custom font is any non-system-default typeface you manually upload to your website.

Closing tag

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A closing tag is an instructional piece of code that ends a section of page content in HTML.

Link block

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A link block operates much like a div block, an HTML element for grouping and organizing other HTML elements (like text, images, and forms) into block-level containers. But in the case of a link block, what’s inside the block becomes a link.

Hotlink

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A hotlink — also known as a remote or inline link — is a hyperlink that directs to a resource, such as an image or a file, without the owner’s explicit permission.

Save as Backup

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The ability to manually save a version of your site that you can restore at a later date using the keyboard shortcut Command + Shift + S (on Mac) or Control + Shift + S (on Windows).‍

Descendant selector

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A descendant selector is a CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) selector that targets elements nested inside a parent element.

Cascading rules

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The order in which a Webflow site's CSS styles flow from desktop to mobile breakpoints.

Dropdown

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A dropdown, or dropdown menu, is a pre-built navigation element you can add to almost any part of a website.

Collection item

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An individual item within a Collection. For example, in a “Blog Posts” Collection, the Collection items are individual blog posts.

Page name

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The title of a page in your site. This is visible in the Pages panel.

Save

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The Designer automatically saves your progress every 10 seconds.

Webflow branding

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A visible “Made in Webflow” badge displayed in the bottom right corner of Webflow sites. Webflow branding also appears in the site’s HTML. Learn more about Webflow branding.

Tablet breakpoint

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A Webflow canvas setting for creating styles that affect viewports with a minimum width of 768px and a maximum width of 990px. Also known as the tablet media query.

Cookie

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Cookies are small text files sent by a website to a user’s web browser that enhance their browsing experience by remembering site preferences and activities.

Collection

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A content type (blog posts, recipes, etc.) represented by a group of fields you define. Once created, you can add individual Collection items.

Lightbox

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A lightbox displays content in a popup or modal window on top of a web page’s main content.

Last updated

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The last time someone made a change to your site.

Shim

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A shim is a code snippet enabling modern web features to function within older programming or browsing environments.

Smoke test

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A smoke test, also called build verification testing or confidence testing, is a preliminary examination to determine the basic functionality of a software, website, or application.

Zapier

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A web app that helps you connect multiple third-party services together based on triggers and actions.

JPEG

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Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, JPEG is a file format that uses lossy compression to maintain manageable file sizes without compromising image quality.

Section

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A section is an element of design layout that divides a web page into visually distinct segments.

Compile

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Compiling is the process of converting code from a high-level programming language into a low-level language that computers can understand.

Argument

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An argument is an independent value a function receives to deliver a specific output.

Top margin

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Top margin is a CSS property that defines the space between the top edge of an element and its surroundings, such as other elements, the browser window, or the edge of a container.

Behavioral targeting

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Behavioral targeting is a marketing technique that leverages user data to deliver personalized ads to drive conversions.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics)

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PNG, short for Portable Network Graphics, is a lossless image format known for its transparency support and quality retention after compression.

Decryption

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Decryption is the process of reverting encrypted data to its original format.

Common targets

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All elements on the page targeted by the same selector.

Network Address Translation (NAT)

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NAT (Network Address Translation) is a technique that enables communication between devices with private internet protocol addresses and the public internet.

End user

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An end user is an individual or group who directly interacts with a particular product, service, or user interface (UI), such as a website or application.

Font weight

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Font weight refers to the thickness or density of a typeface’s strokes.

Mutable

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In JavaScript, mutable objects are dynamic elements that allow post-creation changes and modifications.

Pseudocode

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Pseudocode is a simplified, informal representation of programming code that outlines a program’s structure and logic without strict syntax.

Forms section

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A section of the Add panel that houses form elements like inputs, checkboxes, and radio buttons.

Total Site Pages

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The amount of pages your site currently has.

Key

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A key, or web key, is a unique identifier that authorizes access to a webpage or service.

Style panel

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The first tab in the right-side panel that allows you to assign classes to elements and style them.

Cryptanalysis

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Cryptanalysis examines cryptographic systems to find weaknesses that could allow attackers to uncover plaintext or break encryption.

Delete element

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To remove an element and its content from your website.

Display property

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Display properties operate like instructions that tell a browser how to display the different parts of a webpage. You can customize an element’s appearance and layout by changing its display property.

CMS section

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A section in the Add panel that contains elements associated with the CMS.

Sorting Collection lists

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You can sort your Collection items in multiple ways — select the field from the Collection you wish to filter from, then select the ordering option.

ASCII

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The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is an encoding standard that assigns numerical values to characters and translates them into computer-readable code.

Flex-shrink

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The flex-shrink CSS property defines how much an element shrinks relative to other flexible items inside the same parent element.

Meta title

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A meta title is an HTML element that defines a web page's title and appears in browser tabs and search snippets on search engine results pages (SERPs) as a clickable headline.

Top of the funnel

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Top of the funnel (TOFU) refers to the initial marketing funnel stage where potential customers become aware of a brand’s existence.

Valid

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A valid CSS pseudo-class is a keyword that enables styling HTML elements based on their state or position in the document structure or web page.

Sidebar

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A sidebar, typically positioned on the left or right side of a website or app, is a vertical component that contains supplemental information to enrich a webpage’s primary content.

Strong text

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The <strong> element defines important text with added semantic importance.

Editor toolbar

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The toolbar that appears at the bottom of the Editor. From here, you can access the various Editor panels to manage page settings, dynamic content, forms, and your Editor account. You can also see and publish the changes you make through the Editor.

Percent

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A measurement unit relative to an element's parent.
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