.wav
An audio file format. Very accurate, but offers no compression, thus resulting in very large files.

.wma
Refers to the file format for Microsoft's Windows Media Player.

W3C
World Wide Web Consortium. An international industry consortium that develops standards for the world wide web.

WAIS
Wide Area Information Servers. A commercial software package that allows the indexing of huge quantities of information, and then making those indices searchable across networks such as the Internet.

A prominent feature of WAIS is that the search results are ranked (scored) according to how relevant the hits are, and that subsequent searches can find more stuff like that last batch and thus refine the search process.

WAN
Wide Area Network. Any internet or network that covers an area larger than a single building or campus.

Web Browser
A web browser is the software application used to browse or surf the web aspect of the Internet. The web browser reads the HTML codes in a webpage and presents the page to the visitor with the formatting, etc.

Popular web browser applications include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, AOL browser, etc.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer has probably well over 90% of the browser market. Most webmasters today design primarily for the Internet Explorer browser.

Webmaster
A person responsible for the maintenance of a particular website.

Whois
A searchable database maintained by Network Solutions, which contains information about networks, networking organizations, domain names, and the contacts associated with them for the com, org, net, edu, and ISO 3166 country code top-level domains. Also, the protocol, or set of rules, that describes the application used to access the database.

Other organizations have implemented the Whois protocol and maintain separate and distinct Whois databases for their respective domains.

WIPO
World Intellectual Property Organization. Official web site is at http://www.wipo.org. They are frequently mentioned in cases of cyber squatting as they have the power to decide who keeps disputed domain names.

WWW
World Wide Web (or Web) is the most popular Internet service. It allows access to the information and services from the web servers. A web browser is needed to use the Web.