Terms

Users

The SAM Web Standards identifies the following user types (not to be confused with personas established for transition.SAM.gov):

Front-end user: An individual using the Website.
Front-end developer: A developer who is responsible for creating code to display the front-end to front-end users.
Middleware developer: A developer who is responsible for creating code that acts as a bridge between the front-end presentation and back-end data layers.
Back-end developer: A developer who is responsible for creating data architectures and relationships to be accessed via APIs.

The SAM Web Standards recognizes the following states for front-end users and developers:

Unauthenticated: A user who has NOT signed in to the site via the sign in process.
Authenticated: A user who has signed in to the via the registration and sign in process.

The SAM Web Standards identifies the following technology layers to describe the human-computer interaction of transition.SAM.gov:

Presentation: Represents the final rendered page in a browser.
Markup: Refers to all markup and code downloaded to (or run on) the user’s computer (client-side) to render (or update) the page in a browser.
Middleware: Refers to code acting as a bridge between the markup and data layers; further, this layer may refer to server-side code used in calculating, preparing, or returning information.
Data: Refers to all individual files, database tables and database records stored for retrieval by the interface layer.

The SAM Web Standards identifies the following types of devices:

Mobile: A handheld device; usually with a physical display width of less than six inches, and an on-screen keyboard.
Tablet: A handheld device; usually with a physical display width of more than six inches, but less than 13 inches, and an on-screen keyboard.
Desktop/Laptop: Not a hendheld device; usually with a physical display width equal to or greater than 13 inches, and a physical keyboard.

The SAM Web Standards identifies the following types of pages when navigating to a URL:

Public: A page that can be viewed by an unauthenticated user.
Private: A page that can only be viewed by an authenticated user.
Mixed: A page wherein content might change dependent on your access rights and authentication status.