Internet, Web, and Other Post-Watergate Concerns
Q. We are debating in our office how to refer to our Web site when the URL appears at the beginning of the sentence. Would we capitalize the first letter (i.e., Www.abcd.com [address changed for this forum]) or not (i.e., www.abcd.com)? Are there any conventions around dropping the “www” (i.e., abcd.com)? If so, would we capitalize the first letter (i.e., Abcd.com)? What about all caps (i.e., ABCD.COM or WWW.ABCD.COM)?
A. We’d never write “Www” just to honor the beginning of a sentence. More likely, we’d advise rewriting to avoid such a thing (compare eBay/EBay). That said, I suspect that there will be a move toward varieties of capitalization in partial URLs used in the run of ordinary text (i.e., when the syntax isn’t doing any work as syntax but when it’s acting like a word). This should apply especially to dot-com expressions commonly written without www or http or other syntactical baggage—which can be omitted when writing about a Web site rather than directing people to it—as in your example of “abcd.com.” So, for example, though the former surgeon general’s site [no longer associated with Dr. Koop] is referred to in its own literature as “drkoop.com,” I think it would have been more sensible to write DrKoop.com (though we hesitate to go that far in the fifteenth edition; see paragraph 8.74). By the way, http://www.DrKoop.com/ works just as well as http://www.drkoop.com/ (and this first part of a URL, comprising the protocol and the name of the server, is never case sensitive). I like, therefore, “ABCD.com” in running text. Your company is known properly by the initialism ABCD, not abcd. So what if your browser tends to resolve server names to lowercase letters. Computers and people read text differently. In any case, we haven’t finished ironing this out. Debates rage.
