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Wait, what is a portal, then, and where are you getting that definition from? I have been a web dev for a decade and I also understand a "portal" to be a broadly applicable term meaning basically any webapp that grants access to some data. Did it once have some narrower meaning, in times long past before I was a dev?

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I've always taken it to be a portion of a website that takes you onward to different areas of the website. Like, at least in Wikipedia, a portal is generally a list of links to areas related to a topic. In sales software, a sales portal generally leads you to areas in the website like sales flows, or something else.

Around Y2K, a portal was a web-page that linked to assorted on- and off-site resources; the Yahoo! front page was a portal. It was a kind of aggregator, and commonly the off-site content would display within the portal site (don't let them navigate away from our site!)

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