Are you reading a Web page or a web page?

A few thousand years ago, we wouldn't have given it a second thought. There were no computers, of course. There were also no lowercase letters in the roman alphabet, which some people still call the Roman alphabet.

SENTENCES LOOKED LIKE THIS, although they were in Latin not English (TOTUS SCRIPTOR VIDEOR HAC – a quick and loose translation that wouldn't impress many language scholars, but at least it gives you the general drift.)

Coming up with a more flexible system made reading easier. But in some ways it also made writing and editing harder.

You have to stop now to make choices. Well, you don't actually have to. But you probably want to if your standards are higher than, say, goofball531@hotmail.com who seems to think that "spam" stands for Spelling and Punctuation Are Meaningless.

Which brings us back to the opening question. Is this a Web page or a web page? Last week, CBC News Online would have said a "Web page."

But we've made a few changes around here, and now it's a "web page" – a decision that may prompt e-mail, also known in some circles as E-mail, E mail, email, and Uhmail.

A B CP ...

The language we speak and write is constantly evolving. Almost 100 years ago, the first edition of what's now known as Strunk and White's The Elements of Style insisted on to-day, to-night and to-morrow. Much of the book's general advice on clear writing remains relevant. But its specific edicts on how to spell certain words were abandoned decades ago.

Every few years, stylebooks (known to some as style books) get updated. We rely heavily on a superb tome published by the Canadian Press that's about 500 pages thick. Recently, CP issued a new version of its separate "Caps and Spelling" manual.

Buckle your seat-belts, because they're now seatbelts. And, while your paycheques probably haven't changed recently, pay day is now payday.

This doesn't mean that "seat-belt" and "pay day" are wrong. They're simply no longer preferred by some journalists who make their living dealing with words.

World Wide but worldwide

We now use a videocassette (not video cassette) to record a miniseries (not mini-series) about a tai chi (not Tai Chi) teacher from Zhou Enlai's (not Chou En-lai's) hometown (not home town).

For those of us who work at CBC.ca, some of the more noticeable changes are found under W. Although World Wide Web (WWW) remains the same because it's an established proper noun, its derivatives no longer have a capital W.

Instead of Web writers, for instance, we now have web writers. They work on web pages that web browsers find on websites (which, as one word, is quite the sight). The World Wide Web, by the way, can be seen worldwide, which keeps life interesting.

An i for an I

The shift from Web to web nudged CBC's Online Language Advisory Board into taking a closer look at another word that's been gnawing at a few of us for years: Internet. Despite some other sweeping changes, the Canadian Press still prefers a capital "I." So do most major news organizations in North America.

But we write television reporters, not Television reporters, and radio programs, not Radio programs. So why do we need to call our web articles "Internet stories"?

A few years ago, when the term was still relatively unknown, the capital I seemed to suit the word. Now, however, it stands out as hoity-toity – especially when our friends at CBC's internal network (our intranet) are told by CP that they don't merit a big letter.

So CBC News Online has adopted "internet" – a small sign, we think, that the medium is maturing.

An eye on dictionaries

We're not alone. The BBC and many British newspapers use "internet." The Times (in London, not New York) has even slashed WWW down to "world wide web." Some lexicographers are betting that the trend toward a small "i" will continue, and that dictionaries will eventually be updated. But the move may take a while.

A quick check of hundreds of newspapers, mostly from Britain and the U.S., suggests the ratio is about 4.5 to 1 (635 for Internet, 140 for internet), according to the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, John Simpson.

When asked for a comment by CBC.ca this week, he pointed out that Oxford bases its entries for such words on current evidence of popular use. At the moment, most published material features Internet.

"Maybe internet will become standard – it saves an extra shift-key depression on the keyboard – but it's not there yet," Simpson said.

Letter of the law

A few people claim that the internet demands a capital I because it's a place like no other that's been given a name all its own. Actually it's not really a place. It's an invention. And unlike, say, Touchtone or Xerox, it's never had a single company enforcing trademark protection.

In fact, some of the internet's creators have gone to court to make sure that the word remains in the public domain.

One of them is Robert Kahn, who helped lay the groundwork for the global network of computers we use today. "We defended the right of people to use the word," he told the New York Times last winter, "whether you use a cap I or little i."

Even if it's thought of as a unique place, internet can be treated in the same way as cyberspace – as a noun, not as a "proper" noun. In outer space, of course, there are nicknames, such as Milky Way. But the universe, itself, doesn't merit a capital U. The universe is bigger than the Milky Way. The internet is larger than a Palm Pilot or even the World Wide Web.

No universal rules

In English, the choice of internet or Internet and web or Web is a matter of preference not accuracy. One of the primary goals of all usage guides is consistency. Since dictionaries often list more than one version of a term (MC and emcee, for instance), newsrooms and publishing houses have to come up with their own plans.

Given the atmosphere of confusion over the E in Earth (a planet with one moon) versus the e in most expressions featuring the word earth ("what on earth?"), it's not surprising to hear editors screaming EeEeEeEeEeE when they discover orbiting inconsistencies destined to collide.

At the New York Times they still eat French fries, while at the Canadian Press they find the big F a bit hard to swallow. German suddenly looks pretty appealing, with its relatively straightforward capitalization of virtually all words acting as nouns – something of importance (etwas Wichtiges) to a writer (ein Verfasser) who's in a hurry (in einer Hast).

There's no universal set of rules in English, just as there's no consensus on what the U in URL stands for. Many dictionaries list both "uniform" and "universal" before "resource locator." Even programmers writing explanatory notes at the World Wide Web Consortium seem to go back and forth.

In an article in The New Yorker earlier this month, Louis Menand outlined many of the niggling disagreements over the use of periods, commas, capital letters, and so forth. He concluded:

"The perfect manual of style would be like the perfect map of the world: exactly coterminous with its subject, containing a rule for every word of every sentence. We would need an extra universe to accommodate it. It would be worth it."

Perhaps we'll discover that parallel universe one day, using a universal (or uniform) resource locator.

In the meantime, we have our own internal style guide at CBC.ca, several shelves crammed with other reference books, a bottle of Aspirins (which, in the United States, can be called "aspirins" because the word no longer enjoys proprietary protection down there), and the internet (not Internet) a click away.