AP Style Alert: Don't Capitalize Internet and Web Anymore (poynter.org)

Saturday the Associated Press announced they're changing the rules in their influential stylebook: the words "internet" and "web" should no longer be capitalized. "The changes reflect a growing trend toward lowercasing both words," their standards editor told Poynter.org, pointing out that both words "have become generic terms." Words tend to be lowercased as their usage becomes more common, and Poynter.org points out that "In 2011, e-mail became email... in 2010, Web site became website." In 2013 the AP even revised their usage of the term "illegal immigration," advising "use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant," as part of a push towards'ridding the Stylebook of labels."

Comments

Modish but foolish

[Archtech]

I can see how this decision fits in with modern fashion. The whole idea of a proper noun seems to grate - perhaps it clashes with the pervasive inverted snobbery of our culture. Many people's forum handles lower-case ordinary names, subtly suggesting that they are more sophisticated than old-fashioned upper-cased names.

As others have pointed out, there is in practice only one Internet: so it should be "the Internet". There are of course many intranets, and you can talk about different partial internets; but if they are not part of the Internet, the usage is merely confusing; and if they are part of the Internet, why use the same name for the whole and a part of it?

As for the Web, it was invented and freely given to the world by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN. Sir Tim has always emphasized that it should be both unique and world-wide, hence the proper name "the World Wide Web".

Here is his authoritative explanation:

Q: How in fact do you spell World Wide Web?

A: It should be spelled as three separate words, so that its acronym is three separate "W"s. There are no hyphens. Yes, I know that it has in some places been spelled with a hyphen but the official way is without. Yes, I know that "worldwide" is a word in the dictionary, but World Wide Web is three words.

I use "Web" with a capital W to indicate that it is an abbreviation for "World Wide Web". Hence, "What a tangled web he wove on his Web site!".

Often, WWW is written and read as W3, which is quicker to say. In particular, the World Wide Web consortium is W3C, never WWWC.

Q: Why did you call it WWW?

A: Looking for a name for a global hypertext system, an essential element I wanted to stress was its decentralized form allowing anything to link to anything. This form is mathematically a graph, or web. It was designed to be global of course. (I had noticed that projects find it useful to have a signature letter, as the Zebra project at CERN which started all its variables with "Z". In fact by the time I had decided on WWW, I had written enough code using global variables starting with "HT" for hypertext that W wasn't used for that.). Alternatives I considered were "Mine of information" ("Moi", c'est un peu egoiste) and "The Information Mine ("Tim", even more egocentric!), and "Information Mesh" (too like "Mess" though its ability to describe a mess was a requirement!). Karen Sollins at MIT now has a Mesh project.

https://www.w3.org/People/Bern...