Is the main basis for the WWW today. During the browser wars there were incompatabilities, which are currently being recovered from as HTML is currently standardized by the W3C.

The replacement for SGML.

A system of "marking up" plain text with "tags". An old standard, which is slowly being replaced by XML.

A certain Redmond, VA, USA, Earth software company. Some say it is owned by satan himself.

MS' single-tasking operating system, which lived on in Win95, Win98 and WinME

MS' GUI successor to MS-DOS

Refers to all the modern Unices and Unix-like systems; GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, GNU/the Hurd, Solaris & MacOS X.

Refers to the tradition of ending strings (in object code & the C/C++ languages) with a zero character.

MS' current documentation system and the subject of this specification.

Bits are the digits 0 and one in the binary numbering system (same as decimal, but only two digits - 0/1). A bit field is a number of bits, usually packed together into a DWORD (32 bits). To combine bits you can use the bitwise OR operator. When combining values that are a power of 2 (eg 1, 2, 4, 8, 16...) you can simply add them together, since they are composed of a single 1 bit and a number of 0 bits (eg 0000000000000100 = 2^2 = 4).