A LITTLE LESS JARGON
Know what
the words mean.
Plain-language definitions for the ideas that appear across low-code web design, AI tools, and app-building projects.
Use this glossary as a working vocabulary, not a reason to delay your first project. The same term may appear differently in a particular platform. When a product-specific behavior matters, inspect its official documentation and test the requirement directly.
The definitions below connect to the practical distinctions used throughout the guides: content versus application behavior, identity versus permission, and a generated draft versus a reviewed result.
- Low-code
- An approach that uses visual tools and reusable structures, with custom code or technical configuration where the project needs it.
- No-code
- An approach centered on the controls a platform exposes without requiring users to write code for the intended workflow. Product labels and boundaries vary.
- Visual development
- Building or configuring an interface, data model, or workflow through a visual environment rather than expressing every step as handwritten code.
- AI-assisted design
- Using AI to help with a bounded design task—such as an outline, draft, or component proposal—while keeping requirements and review under human control.
- Component
- A reusable interface pattern with a defined purpose, appearance, and behavior, such as a navigation menu or article card.
- Design system
- A shared set of choices for typography, spacing, color, components, and interaction that makes related pages easier to build and maintain consistently.
- Data model
- A description of the records an application uses, their fields, and the relationships between them.
- Workflow
- A sequence of events, decisions, and actions that moves a piece of work from one state to another.
- Authentication
- The process of verifying an identity. Being signed in does not automatically grant permission to every record or action.
- Authorization
- The decision about whether a particular identity may perform an action on a particular resource.
- API
- An interface through which software can request information or actions from another system. Its permissions and failure behavior matter when connecting applications.
- Idempotency
- A property that makes repeating an operation have the same intended effect as performing it once. It matters when events or requests may be retried.
- Canonical URL
- The preferred address identified for a page when multiple addresses might otherwise represent the same content.
- Responsive layout
- A layout that adapts to available space while preserving useful content order and interaction, rather than simply shrinking a desktop design.
- Structured data
- Machine-readable information that describes a page or entity. It should match the accurate, visible content rather than add unsupported claims.
- Vendor lock-in
- Dependence on a provider’s formats, services, or runtime that can make moving a project require additional work. Content export and application portability are different questions.
Put the vocabulary to work.
Choose a small website or app example and identify its components, data, and workflow. A term becomes useful when it helps you explain a real decision rather than simply recognize a label in a feature list.
Choose your first learning path ↗