The Internet would be easy to understand and talk and write about if only it would stop changing every week—but instead, some novel terms of art turn into hackneyed clichés and others become mainstream shorthand.
I started writing about the online world for the Washington Post in mid-1994; in a lot of ways, I’m still figuring out what is and is not obvious about all this. The linguistic target keeps moving, and I don’t expect this situation to change for a long time. The point of the text we’re working on shouldn’t keep moving around, however, and that’s why a guidebook like this is helpful. In self-defense, as we try to keep up with the fluidity of Internet style, we need some baselines.
Here’s a baseline we can all agree on: Writing and speaking about the Web, and about any other technical topic—quantum physics, the history of NASA’s Apollo program, automotive maintenance, or Bruce Springsteen bootlegs—should aim to nail down meanings without clouting the thumb of the everyday reader. Unnecessary jargon, unexplained acronyms, and jarring inconsistencies can quash attention and slow comprehension.
Consider, for instance, the issue of how to describe Usenet newsgroups—a topic that, about a decade ago, provoked constant arguments on the alt.internet.media-coverage newsgroup (itself a casualty of Internet evolution—here today, gone today).
Coverage in the mass media would most often describe these forums as Internet message boards or online bulletin boards. The true believers, who had been holding forth on Usenet for years before any newspaper had an inkling that a story could originate there, flamed (that is, vituperatively criticized) the “old media” for “not getting it.” Meanwhile, the few journalists online at that point argued, essentially, “Look, nobody’s going to be that confused by this term, and at least people will have a chance of getting the analogy.”
Those journalists had a point, but they were wrong. Not referring to Usenet as Usenet or newsgroups as newsgroups meant that readers had no easy way of trying this resource out for themselves with their own software, which didn’t and still doesn’t use terms like message boards or bulletin boards. Details do matter—especially since readers can go check things out for themselves.
A similar debate has been going on about how to specify a Web site’s location (which, incidentally, I don’t call a URL unless I’m writing for a technical audience—what’s wrong with “address”?). If you simply specify the domain name, you can save a lot of trouble all around. One, plenty of Web-based companies include the .com extension in their names, so the name is the Web address. Two, almost all current Web browsers will fill in the www. and http:// prefixes for you—why make the reader type in extra characters?
But on the other hand, there’s no shortage of Web addresses that don’t start with www.—not to mention the few heretical Web addresses that depart from the standard http://. (For instance, banking and other sites may start with https://, with that s denoting an encrypted connection secured against eavesdropping.)
Hence, I continue to insist on the full Web address. I am losing this fight, though, both at my office and in this book. It grates on me—why not be consistent and minimize reader confusion?—but I have, so far, been unable to drag everybody else along. (People become quite passionate about these matters. We editors take pride in the inventive patches we’ve used to construct our preferred-usage crazy quilts.)
I do have one consolation, though: The fashion for addresses, along with other Internet-related conventions, will almost certainly change yet again. But we’re not going to make deadlines, and we’re not going to be taken seriously, if we start from scratch stylistically every day. We can’t wait until matters of style settle down; we have work to do today.
This book can help you settle an argument or start one, if you need to, perhaps with the guy down the hall who insists on lowercasing the web but wants you to know that he is a Webmaster. Editors are still the arbiters of much that is happening in publishing; they have their work cut out for them. Fortunately, they have this book.
Rob Pegoraro (rob@twp.com)
Consumer electronics editor, Washington Post
Spring 2000