Language, Culture, and the Internet

Part I

Beth Skwarecki
Fall 2000

Note: in Internet Explorer 5, Netscape 6, or Mozilla, hold your mouse over any green word to see a definition or explanation of that word.

This paper is available in single-spaced and double-spaced versions.

Table of Contents


Introduction

The internet started out as a network of (mostly) military and university computers, in an era when computers were rare. But, linguistically, there were two significant features of this network: it was American, and its communications were conducted in plain (ascii) text.

Email, discussion boards, real-time chat, and even the World Wide Web began with text-only protocols. In a world made up of little more than alphanumeric characters, spelling and grammar were important (you could be as informal as you like, so long as you appeared intelligent). Around this time, conventions of language and of politeness evolved, and ascii art flourished.

The early networks were American and as such communicated in English. The internet spread, though. the Web came into being in Switzerland, at CERN. English is the lingua franca of the internet, though its dominance has been decreasing.

The internet has come a long way since it was the domain of hackers (programmers). Web browsers gained the ability to display graphics and interpret scripting languages, among other things; and everything moved onto the web (see below) or into the browser. Banner advertising and commercial websites proliferated. But what of the language?

"Curiously, Linux and mass access to the Internet haven't given rise to the huge efflorescence of entirely new jargon one might expect; instead, many existing jargon terms have acquired new spins and become more widely known outside of hackerdom proper. Perhaps this reflects the fact that, startling though their impact on the general public is, the new technologies have so far mostly changed relative costs and scales of activity rather than opening up domains of possibility fundamentally new to the imaginations of hard-core hackers." -- ESR, The New Hacker's Dictionary.

The General Nature of the Net

Internet technologies and their offline analogues

The means by which people communicate online are sufficiently different from IRL means of communication (face-to-face conversation, telephone, postal mail, books and magazines, flyers, graffiti, ...) to warrant a brief discussion of how they differ from each other and from more traditional means of communication. The four technologies below aren't all there is to the internet - take Napster as an example of something not included - but they do represent the some of the most common ways people talk to each other through computers. These four make up most of the context to the linguistic issues I discuss in the rest of the paper.

e-mail

Email (the official expansion is "electronic mail") is a way of sending text-based messages to another person over the internet. Ray Tomlinson wrote the ancestor to modern email programs in 1971, and added the @ symbol in a 1972 rewrite (Hobbes' Internet Timeline).

Email is compared, even in its name, to postal mail. One person can send messages to another at their email address (and cc, or carbon-copy, others), where the message is received in an inbox. Using the same office metaphor that has given us the concepts of the computer "desktop" and the "recycle bin" (or "trash can"), email messages are stored in folders, and icons within the programs show envelopes and the like, such as these from the Outlook email client:

{image of envelope and folder}     {image of file and folder}     {image of mail and envelope}
The administrator in charge of email on a particular computer or network is known as the postmaster. And yet email is in many ways more similar to the telephone (because of its immediacy and informality) than to the postal mail system.

The application of a mail metaphor to email arises from the fact that the messages are written rather than spoken, and that they need not be answered immediately. However, email is much more informal than a traditional letter. The writer doesn't have to locate a writing implement and suitable stationery, nor purchase a stamp, nor walk to a mailbox. Sending an email requires only that the user click a button (or hit a keyboard shortcut); an email can be composed and sent in only a few minutes, especially when one is already at the computer. The writing style is informal because the context is informal - "It makes little sense to slave over a message for hours, making sure that your spelling is faultless, your words eloquent, and your grammar beyond reproach, if the point of the message is to tell your co-worker that you are ready to go to lunch" (Sherwood). Email is often used to hold a conversation that in earlier days may have been held over the phone (such as arranging a meeting). Many people prefer to use email for such details because they don't have to hope that their target is in the office, or that the call won't be an interruption.

The time delay, however, is not trivial. Information that may previously have been disseminated over the telephone can be exchanged by people separated by time as well as distance. This is especially valuable to people who customarily work odd hours, like programmers.

"Just as the VCR has allowed television watchers to 'time-shift' movies, electronic mail allows the hacker to time-shift most of his communication with others, making it much less important for everyone to have exactly the same work hours."-- Guy L. Steele Jr., The New Hacker's Dictionary Jargon File

Another effect of the informality of email is its lack of the typical structure of a letter: neither party's contact information is necessarily included, and the greeting and closing are often (but not always) omitted - the headers (information that's there primarily for the use of the email programs that deliver the message) provide the names and (email) addresses of the sender, recipient, and any parties being cc'd.

In business emails, the physical contact information of the sender is often included in the signature (often called a ".sig", after the file in which some systems store it), but signatures have other purposes. But more often, a signature is akin to a car bumper - a place for favorite quotes, jokes, and political statements.

Discussion boards

Under this heading I include Usenet (see Deja), web-based boards and forums of all sorts (like this classic example, or this unthreaded board), and the discussions on many news-based sites (where readers are invited to comment on an article, such as Slashdot and ZDNet). Discussions have much in common with email, even to the point of including signatures. Many email clients double as newsreaders. Further blurring the line are mailing lists, which are a sort of discussion board in which the messages are distributed by email to members, instead of being publicly available.

There is no good offline analogue to discussion boards, though one could perhaps point to discussions carried out in the graffiti of bathroom walls. The term 'board' comes from the analogy of a bulletin board - a message on a board is even termed a 'post' - but real bulletin boards are more a place for announcements than for extended back-and-forth discussions. The term 'forum' has also been used, but the difference between a discussion board and a place for oral conversation is that the discussion board allows one discussion to break up into multiple sub-threads, where a participant can engage in any number of these more specific conversations. The time delay as well as the text-based nature of a board can allow the poster to think about their post, research certain points briefly, look up webpages or books to recommend, and even provide quotes from sources relevant to the discussion. Discussions on such boards are for these reasons more extensive and more likely to be of a scholarly nature than conversations that occur in real life or in chatrooms.

Mailing lists and Usenet are text-based, but web boards often allow posts to include HTML (and thus graphics, links, and other formatting), though sometimes the HTML allowed is restricted to a few basic tags. There is also a simple markup language called UBB Code that allows users to make their text bold, italicized, or a hyperlink - but little else.

Real-time chat

This includes web-based chatrooms (such as those on Yahoo) as well as IRC, instant messaging, and the like. Because chat occurs in real-time, and because (in most systems) you have to hit <enter> before your words will appear to others, people type in short chunks (sometimes splitting up a sentence into multiple lines) and don't have the opportunity to research what they say, chatrooms are more often used as social gathering places than as places for discussion (though chatrooms may be built around a topic or may have experts answering questions).

Older chat technologies were strictly text-based, but many modern web-based chatrooms (especially those programmed in Java) allow users to insert graphics like smiley faces, change the color of their type, and use italic and boldface.

the Web

Unlike the other technologies mentioned, the web (technically the "World Wide Web") traditionally puts a large divide between those who speak and those who listen. Although all three of the technologies mentioned above can be implemented on the web, they are done through a protocol that emphasizes the relationship between a client and a server.

Webpages are stored on computers called 'servers.' A 'client' - a web browser like Netscape or Internet Explorer - will request a document from the server, and the server sends out the page for the client to display. There are, of course, variations on this - the client can send information to the server, and programs on the server can mimic all sorts of interactivity (like message boards and chatrooms and programs that will send email), but the unique thing about the web is the fact that, traditionally, it has clear producers and consumers of the information on it. Content on webpages is created by someone on the server end, to be read by someone on the client end - similar to the way the publisher of a book or magazine makes information available for others to read.

Unlike a book or magazine, though, webpages are simple to create and publish. Some rudimentary knowledge of HTML or else a WYSIWYG editor is all that's needed to publish any information you like to a potential audience of many millions of people. Although a corporation may pay thousands of dollars to have a flashy site designed, a teenager who wants to put her poetry or warez or political opinions on the web can do so for no more cost than the time invested. This also means that information can be made available that doesn't make a profit for the writer. As Scott McCloud points out in this comic, content, such as certain music genres, that only appeals to small numbers of people can be made available more easily on the web than in a brick-and-mortar store:

A primary cause of the difference between the two systems is, of course, the enormous gauntlet of obstacles traditional producers have to go through including [manufacturing, battling for shelf space, etc ...] just to make a single copy of that single work available to a single customer! ... In contrast, all that online music producers have to do is add a file and a link or two because they don't have to go where the customer is -- the customer comes to them!

Unlike a book or a magazine, content on a website can be updated at any time - no need to publish separate errata, or wait until the next issue to print readers' comments. Websites such as GenBank can add new information to their website as soon as that information becomes available; sites that publish news and articles can correct mistakes and make retractions easily, though whether and how readers should be informed of changes is debated. Caches of pages are, however, made by search engines and others (Google being one of the better-known) - this can be used to view websites that, for example, were removed by court order or are temporarily out-of-service.

Another important thing to remember is that text downloads much faster than graphics. Text is transferred by a code that merely indicates which letters to display; the browser gets the task of actually choosing a font and displaying the text. Graphics, however, are encoded in a format that requires much more detailed information to be transferred (since, ultimately, the color of each pixel must be defined). However, in media where people want to see information that's attractively presented, graphics are essential -- see any print magazine for an example of this. So websites use a lot of graphics to make their site look slick; while it takes less time to look at a graphic than to skim text, the graphic downloads slower on the web. This stops some sites from using too many graphics (like useit.com or yahoo), but the vast majority cover their sites in graphics for aesthetic reasons. Here are just a few examples: hesketh.com, Elle, Jeopardy, galeon, Nauticom. One solution to this paradox is Flash, a technology that allows graphically heavy sites (even with substantial animation) to download with relative speed. However, Flash has plenty of its own problems.

Hypertext

The full story of hypertext and the philosophies behind it is beyond the scope of this paper, but additional information may be found at this W3C page. Hypertext is, at its core, little more than an interface for cross-referencing (which itself is hundreds of years old). HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee as a common format for sharing documents at CERN (see a screenshot of the original browser). The use of a hand for a cursor may have originated with Hypercard, a Macintosh program that predated the web.

The web is interactive in a way that traditional media, like magazines or television, cannot be. Because the user can choose links to follow and can fill out forms (whose contents become the input for programs run on the server that generate more pages), the content of the website can be more relevant to the reader than a traditional publication. Any word can become a hypertext link if the author chooses to make it one; the choice of linked websites is as much a part of the content of the webpage as the text.

Hypertext has also been likened to "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, which had several storylines that the reader would choose to follow by making a decision at the end of each page or chapter, such as "Do you open the door? Turn to page 53. Or do you return to the laboratory upstairs? Turn to page 28." Hypertext elegantly handles branchings like this: MouseHand is a hypertext adventure based on this style of book. Another classic use of hypertext is the Interactive Knee - click on a muscle in one of the diagrams to find out more about that muscle.

Vocabulary Affected by the Internet

Hacker - an example

The use of the term hacker to mean 'someone who remotely does malicious things to computers' is fairly new and probably owes its popularity to the internet. The much older (and more technically correct) definition of a hacker is something quite different.

As hackers themselves use it, the word can mean nearly anything, depending on context - a clever programmer; a malicious programmer; an incompetent programmer. Adding to the confusion is the word "hack," which can be a noun or a verb. The Jargon File gives long, multipart definitions for both hack and hacker. To quote:

hacker n.

[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a Unix hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence `password hacker', `network hacker'. The correct term for this sense is cracker. ...

hack

[very common] 1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed. ... 4. vt. To work on something (typically a program). In an immediate sense: "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO." In a general (time-extended) sense: "What do you do around here?" "I hack TECO." More generally, "I hack `foo'" is roughly equivalent to "`foo' is my major interest (or project)". "I hack solid-state physics." See Hacking X for Y. 5. vt. To pull a prank on. See sense 2 and hacker (sense 5). 6. vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. "Whatcha up to?" "Oh, just hacking." 7. n. Short for hacker. ...

The last definition of hacker, the one that is properly called a cracker, is the type of hacker popularly associated with the word. Take, for example, this recent news story about Microsoft: someone gained access to their computers and possibly to the source code for Windows and other products. This person is referred to as a hacker, and his/her actions as hacking. We get quotes like the following:

"Microsoft computer network hacked; FBI steps in"

"... a hacker succeeded in breaking into the company's network ..."

"... the hackers had not obtained access to key programs ..."

[in a comment:] "I think it's cool that they got hacked"
The word "cracker" appears nowhere. While the adventures of pre-internet hackers were celebrated as examples of cleverness by the hacker community in general (see these examples), modern "hackers" (using the term here loosely to mean something along the lines of sense 1, above) are brought into the public eye when they crack major websites. The internet has made malicious hacking easy (there are so many servers around, accessible from so many personal computers) and newsworthy (because many of the cracked machines will belong to large or important companies). Non-techies will only hear the word in the context of some company or other getting 'hacked.'

Further degrading the word hacker is the fact that many crackers are script kiddies who stereotypically +Yp3 1i|<3 7h1s and call themselves h4x0rs. (See this transcript of D1ck and J4n3, real crackers with fictional names who were caught in the act).

So the programmers who are proud of their (legal and beneficial) 'hacking' become annoyed that the term hacker is being equated with mere script kiddies, who they see as not only malicious but stupid - for example, in this sarcastic piece.

Cyber - another example

The offline world has a rather skewed view of the internet; the recent trend, especially in business-oriented media, is to view all of the internet as a playground for young entrepreneurs making millions of dollars with their dot-coms - or, worse, the unpronounceably silly dot.coms. Another, older view of the internet involves the prefix cyber- attached to nearly every word. 'Cyber' apparently comes from cybernetics, "The theory or study of communication and control in living organisms or machines" (OED). The word was first used in 1948, derived from the Greek word for steersman.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists only four words beginning with cyber-(cybernetics, cybernation, cyberpunk, cyberspace); the Jargon File gives three (cybercrud, cyberpunk, cyberspace). Though both sources define cyberspace as a sort of virtual reality, the Jargon File definition is particularly enlightening:

...2. The Internet or Matrix (sense #2) as a whole, considered as a crude cyberspace (sense 1). Although this usage became widely popular in the mainstream press during 1994 when the Internet exploded into public awareness, it is strongly deprecated among hackers because the Internet does not meet the high, SF-inspired standards they have for true cyberspace technology. Thus, this use of the term usually tags a wannabee or outsider. ...

The irony is that few people familiar with the internet ever use cyber (though I seem to recall that at one point its most common online use was as a contraction for cybersex, the chatroom equivalent of phone sex).

Why so few "official" words beginning with cyber-? A Google search for cyber turns up 3.4 million pages; none of the top results use any of the terms mentioned above. cyber- appears to be used to adapt any word to the internet, thus creating thousands of words or phrases that have a very limited scope and audience. To do an unofficial survey, the top ten uses of cyber turned up on Google are:

  1. Cyber Patrol
  2. Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties
  3. Mimi's Cyber-Kitchen Recipes
  4. Cyber Cyclery -- the internet bicycling hub
  5. Playboy Cyber Club
  6. Cyber-Rights Home Page
  7. The Cyber Hymnal
  8. Cyber-Seuss
  9. CYBER-Sierra's Natural Resources Job Search
  10. CYBERsitter Home Page

As might be expected, the term is used by companies marketing to an audience who probably knows little about the internet, like Cyber Patrol and CYBERsitter, makers of filtering software that parents purchase so their children cannot access inappropriate content on the web (at least in theory). Another class of cyber- users is evident in the above grouping: amateur or personal pages created by those who are probably not too familiar with the internet, like the Cyber-Seuss page. This grouping is more of a subjective judgment; it's nearly impossible to verify whether this is the case, though it seems to be.

Conversation

For a more complete list of online terms and their definitions, see the NetLingo dictionary.

acronyms

Online language is characterized in part by its large vocabulary of acronyms. Abbreviated phrases include common expressions (IMHO - in my humble opinion; BTW - by the way; IIRC - if I recall correctly; BRB - be right back), large wordy expressions (WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get; TEOTWAWKI - the end of the world as we know it; ROTFLMAO - rolling on the floor laughing my ass off), and even communications meant to be decoded only by certain people (PAW - parents are watching; SCAW - small children are watching). Another class of acronyms is for common disclaimers (IANAL - I am not a lawyer; YMMV - your mileage may vary).

retronyms

As words are being appropriated for new uses, retronyms appear. Take, for example, snail-mail - when your 'mail' consists of electronic messages, the postal system must be carrying something different, something slower - hence snail-mail (which may be delivered to one's snail address. The jargon file gives this etymology:

Derives from earlier coinage `USnail' (from `U.S. Mail'), for which there have even been parody posters and stamps made.

Retronyms are used on the net because people have become so familiar with the internet that they are used (for example) to thinking that their 'mail' is the stuff that others refer to as the more foreign 'e-mail'. Also, it's reasonable to assume that others on the internet are equally familiar with online technology. Other retronyms refer to real life itself. You can have an F2F (Face to Face) conversation, or do something IRL (In Real Life). Cyberspace has spawned meatspace; hardware and software inspired wetware, meatware, and liveware, all of which mean, more or less, the human nervous system. See the jargon file for more.

e(-)mail

The spelling of email (or, rather, the question of whether to hyphenate and whether to capitalize it) has not yet been standardized. Wired recently revised their Style Guide, which formerly gave the spelling as email, to add the hyphen back in (e-mail). This puzzled many readers (see this discussion on Slashdot.org) who had long since eliminated the hyphen to make it easier to type. One poster pointed out that ease of typing is affecting spelling of some words in the same way that ease of speaking has traditionally changed the pronunciation of words. Several posters had always included the hyphen, and some preferred to capitalize the 'e'. It will be interesting to see the effects of Wired's pronouncement; their Style Guide is a well-respected reference book.

Emoticons

Scott E. Fahlman is credited with inventing :-) and :-(, the smileys or emoticons. Because conversation on the internet is done as informally as one would speak to another in person or over the phone, there's no time to carefully compose one's words to convey an emotion unambiguously; email, chat, and the like require a textual paralanguage, which is provided by the smiley and its friends. Smileys were apparently invented because the mood of some messages was misunderstood - see the email from Scott Fahlman. Nearly everyone on the net has learned that finishing off a sarcastic remark with ;-) ensures that it won't be construed as mean-spirited. Other emoticons evolved from the smiley - here are a few of the less common ones, almost certainly invented for their own sake and not because they're actually useful (how many people would understand what you meant by :-Q ?).

Dependence on text decreasing

a chatroom where graphical smileys are used As chat, discussions, and even email move to the web, purely text-based means of communication are becoming less common. Many chat and email programs have tiny graphics to replace text smileys (not to mention other emotions and objects) - see the screenshot at right, from an msn chat. Variable-width fonts are used to make text easier to read, but they ruin any ascii art or other text formatting. Email is often sent in HTML format. People who send email for their personal use use HTML to color their text and to add boldface or italics; companies who send marketing emails like to include graphics to make their emails look as good as their webpages (in both cases, problems arise when the recipients of the email aren't using an email client that supports HTML mail).


Dependence on text is decreasing not just because technologies (like email) are maturing, allowing things like HTML that weren't part of the original protocols, but also because nearly everything is available through the web, and the few things that aren't are available through web browsers. As the internet becomes more widely used, more of its users are novices who don't have the inclination to learn several different pieces of software to communicate with others. While in the past someone may have had a separate email client, IRC client, news reader, web browser, ftp client, and (perhaps) means of "instant-messaging" someone, today all of those features are available on the web, or at least through the web browser. Hotmail is a web-based email client, where the messages in your account are stored on a webserver where you access them via HTTP. Discussion boards, including usenet itself, are on the web (see my treatment of discussion boards above). Chatrooms are often written in java (and thus available over the web) like yahoo's chatrooms; msn has written a separate program for its chatrooms, but it is available through msn's browser (msn Explorer, a version of Internet Explorer). This screenshot of msn Explorer shows several of its built-in functions (a Flash explanation of its features is available):

click for full screenshot

This browser includes, among other things, utilities for email, instant messaging, chat, and playing music; the music player is actually built into the browser's interface (see this full screenshot). Netscape similarly includes multiple functions - the image below is the corner of a Netscape window, where several of the browser's utilities, called tasks, have icons. They are, from right to left: Navigator(web browsing), Mail(email/usenet), Instant Messenger, Composer (writing HTML), and the Address Book.

{image of taskbar - see text}

International Issues

English as the dominant language?

Most of the text on the internet is English - perhaps between 50 and 85%, depending on the source of the estimate. The internet began in the United States and expanded only later. However, the amount of English content on the internet is decreasing.

As the internet spreads, more and more non-English speakers are using it. The existence of an unofficial standard of English may encourage non-native English speakers to use English exclusively when on the net, as Jeffrey Nunberg writes in this American Prospect article; also pointed out is that Jaques Chirac has called the predominance of English on the internet a "major risk for humanity" because of the threat that the linguistic and cultural uniformity of the internet may help to spread that same language and culture to the offline world as well.

Barbara Wallraff's article in the Atlantic Monthly, however, presents a different future. Even those internet users who are bilingual prefer to read content in their native language - and as the number of like-minded users grows, non-English websites grow in popularity.

As has been widely noted, the Internet, besides being a convenient vehicle for reaching mass audiences such as, say, the citizenry of Japan or Argentina, is also well suited to bringing together the members of small groups -- for example, middle-class French-speaking sub-Saharan Africans. Or a group might be those who speak a less common language: the numbers of Dutch-speakers and Finnish-speakers on the Internet are sharply up. The Internet is capable of helping immigrants everywhere to remain proficient in their first language and also to stay current with what is going on back home. Residents in the Basque communities of Nevada and émigrés from the Côte d'Ivoire, for instance, can browse the periodicals, and even listen to the radio stations, of their homelands -- much as American expatriates anywhere with an Internet connection can check the Web sites for CNN, ABC, MSNBC, and their hometown papers and radio stations.

The ease of publication I mentioned earlier works for non-English speakers here: even small language communities can have their own corner of the web, and specialized search engines and portals can help non-English speakers find content in their language. Nunberg elaborates:

... users can choose to ignore the sea of English content on the Web--and they are not likely to miss it much. [The] AltaVista search for French-language sites on "Roland Barthes," for example, turns up 498 hits. That may be many fewer than the more than 4,200 English-language sites on Barthes, but it's a lot more than most people need or have time to sort through.

Unicode

unicode in action, at www.unicode.org

Character sets contain the alphabet needed for a given language or set of languages, as well as any special characters. One such character set is ascii (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which contains all of the characters appearing on a typical American keyboard. ascii, however, is only a seven-bit code, so it can only contain 128 characters. There are many different character sets, each containing characters that other sets don't have; these character sets don't match up in meaningful ways, so you have to use one or another. The solution to this, currently growing in popularity, is Unicode, one big character set (sixteen bits, or 65,536 possible characters). The major web browsers support Unicode, as do numerous operating systems and other software. Some programming languages support Unicode; some even require it (For more information, see unicode.org).

Hebrew webpages

The web began as a medium for communication in Western languages, and until recently has not well supported bidirectional languages like Hebrew and Arabic. An article by Shoshanna Forbes discusses the difficulties involved in creating Hebrew webpages and the Unicode BiDi algorithm that is becoming the standard (as of May 2000).

click for full screenshot As this partial screenshot shows (or see the full screenshot), Hebrew is a bidirectional (BiDi) language - it's mostly written right-to-left, with certain entities, like numbers and English words, written left-to-right. The operating system supports what is called logical Hebrew, which writes words in the order in which they would be read, like a typical English document; a flag marks text that should be displayed in the opposite direction. Browsers, however, have traditionally only supported left-to-right documents; to write a webpage in Hebrew, authors had to reverse the characters, line-by-line, in a way tricking the web browser into thinking it was displaying a Western document. This is referred to as visual Hebrew and it is completely incompatible with the operating system - for example, the browser's search function is useless, and any page content coming from a database has to be flipped before it's included in the page. Viewers of Hebrew pages had to install a special Western font with Hebrew glyphs in it (much like the common font Symbol is a Western font with Greek glyphs), and then the author of the page had to do the following:

  1. All Hebrew text must be reversed, while leaving any numbers or English text intact. For example, the sentence:
    I love Lucy and will meet with her on May 13
    ... would become...
    13 yaM no reh htiw teem lliw dna ycuL evol I
  2. All line [breaks] must be hard coded into the HTML; you cannot let the browser wrap long lines, since, if you do, the words will get out of order.
  3. All the text must be manually aligned to the right - either with <p align=”right”> or with tables.
  4. You cannot use lists (<ol> or <ul>), since they would be indented to the left instead of to the right.
  5. You cannot define font faces (either via CSS or via the <font> tag), since the Hebrew fonts on the system are logical fonts, and would not work with web pages.
  6. Some elements, like forms and page titles, the browser uses the OS directly to display, which means that they have to be written differently – since the OS use logical Hebrew. (In logical Hebrew, the data is stored in the order it was entered, with a flag marking the directionality. When the data is processed and displayed, the OS uses that flag to keep the correct direction of the element.)

Microsoft's Internet Explorer has supported logical Hebrew, with varying degrees of success, since version 3.0; IBM released a version of Netscape 4.61 in the spring of 2000 that includes support (also imperfect) for logical Hebrew, so that websites could switch to using logical Hebrew without alienating a large percentage of viewers (approximately 20% used Netscape at the time Netscape 4.61 was released).

Conclusion

The internet shows that it is maturing when it is able to accomodate users from linguistic and technological backgrounds that were never considered at its inception. And yet, despite the introduction of new formats and protocols and interfaces, the internet has retained many of its defining characteristics: