Foreword

(from E-What? A Guide to the Quirks of New Media Style and Usage)

I understand that settling style and grammar rules can be difficult when you're working on Internet time. That's why the good people at EEI Communications have been studying these issues; have a look at their work at eeicommunications.com.

Er, I mean, www.eeicom.com.

No, make that http://www.eeicom.com. On the World Wide Web, that is.

To seasoned online pros, any of those three formations would be enough guidance to find the Web home of a company. Given the number of people to whom this is all still new, however, it's not good enough to assume that all readers grok the same Internet dialect. (Though we can often pick up clues from context — you got grok, didn't you?)

The Internet would be easy to understand and talk and write about if only it would stop changing every week — but instead, novel terms of art turn into hackneyed clichés at about the same frequency that dot-com startups rip up their business plans. In my experience, certainty in matters of style doesn't outlive the first e-mail from a reader asking, "How do I get to that site? The address you gave didn't work." I have answered perhaps a thousand of these messages since mid-1994, when I started writing about the online world for the Washington Post. 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, five years 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. prefix for you — why make the reader type in four 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, some bank sites 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: In another year or so, the fashion for addresses, along with other Internet-related conventions, may have changed 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 pedant down the hall who insists on lowercasing the web but wants you to know 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 also have E-What?.

Rob Pegoraro (rob@twp.com)
Consumer electronics editor
The Washington Post
Spring 2000