It's Just About Time

The following from Wired was enough to make me want to stand and cheer.

Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the "I" in internet.

At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.

Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.

True believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies. If It's Capitalized, It Must Be Important. In German, where all nouns are capitalized, it makes sense. It makes no sense in English. So until we become Die Wired Nachrichten, we'll just follow customary English-language usage. (Web will continue to be capitalized when part of the more official entity, World Wide Web.)

In fact ai may stop typing long enough to deliver a brief, one-man standing ovation. Having worked on the web as a writer, editor, and now blogmaster, for the past few years the business of capitalizing "internet" and "web" never made sense to me and was enough to nearly drive me around the bend. However most of the time I went ahead and capitalized the words in my work when it was required. It was a matter of picking my battles.

But no more. If Wired is finally making a stand, then I shall stand with them. It might have made sense to capitalize the two when they were relatively new mediums. But I've been on the web for over 10 years now, as have a lot of other people. I've been emailing for even longer. So, even though people are only just beginning to understand the potential uses of the internet and the web, they aren't new anymore. The Internet is just the internet, and the Web is just the web.

Comments

[Tim Who?]

Count me in, I alway thought it was, if not stupid at least silly. I never capitalize web but I do capitalize internet because my spell check keeps kicking it out if I don't. Well no more, thanks T, I always wondered why they needed to be capitalized and now I know.
They don't.

[trey]

wait, i was supposed to capitalize internet, web and net?

hmm, someone didn't send me the memo. Well, at least I'm doing it right now :D

[T Campbell]

Meh, count me out. Sure, it may be the only capitalized mass medium out there (unless you count "TV"), but there's a reason. *AN* internet exists that is not *THE* Internet, many *webs* exist that are not THE Web. Sure, you've still got the different articles for them-- "a" and "the"-- but they don't always apply. These three phrases, for instance, all have two different valid meanings under current usage.

Dealing with an increasingly complex Web
Dealing with an increasingly complex web

The "spider" crawls the Web
The "spider" crawls the web

The company needs to spend less time on the internet
The company needs to spend less time on the Internet

There's no such difference between "Television" and "television."

WIRED just wants to look cool. You can bet they didn't ask Tim Berners-Lee's permission to "lowercase" his baby-- and it's been a long time since I paid any attention to what they think our language should be.