I'm sorry if this question is too elementary, but I asked it at [MathStackExchange](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/301039/what-is-an-ideal-supporting-algebra) and it received no responses.


On the Wikipedia page for [congruence relation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congruence_relation) it mentions how for groups and rings, congruences can be identified with normal subgroups and ideals respectively, and that the most general algebraic structure for which this can be done are ideal-supporting algebras. But I haven't been able to discover what an ideal-supporting algebra is.



What is an ideal-supporting algebra?
It looks like the term ‘ideal-supporting algebra’ was written by me and survived slightly more than a decade on Wikipedia without being altered. (Well, somebody added a hyphen, a change that I agree with.) Since I put brackets around it, I'm sure that I must have heard the term somewhere, but I couldn't tell you now. Now that I think of it, a more precise term would be ‘ideal-supporting variety [of algebras]’.


And if I search for *that* phrase, I find it in Eric Schechter's 1996 *Handbook of Analysis and its Foundations* (which for some reason Google Books has classified under Business & Economics). Since I was reading this book a lot a decade ago, that's probably what I meant all along. Shechter often invented terminology for his book, when terminology in the literature was inconsistent or missing, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's essentially unique to him.


At this point, probably the best thing for me to do is to edit Wikipedia for a little bit, finishing what I started in 2002.


