The spelling of technology jargon changes as individual words
are over time regarded as outdated or inefficient, and this morphing process
can be entertaining to watch in real time and to examine in hindsight. Come on
up on Grandpa’s knee and let me tell you a story … *cue harp music and echo
effects* … once upon a time…
When a writer referred to a URL in an article in the
1990s, it was typically printed in its entirety: http://www.grammar.com. Then the hypertext abbreviation was dropped,
and soon the www wasn’t required… *harp
music stops* …
Now you can just write grammar.com
in cases when it is obvious you are referring to a URL. URLs are punctuated
normally, and AP additionally recommends you not wrap a URL around a line
break.
The term for a URL back in the http://www days was Web site, always with a capital W, and always two words. It is now a single word, and it is not capitalized. This of
course can vary within some publishing environments, but if any company’s
communications function is still hanging on to either the two words or the
capitalization, they are showing themselves to be out of touch.
One interesting and telling tradition is that Internet was
always capitalized and remains so, because we all know that it is the boss.
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