The language of the Web 205
the Web, and professional designers have been scathing about the
untutored typographical hotchpotches which have been the result,
and have issued warnings about the need for care. Roger Pring, for
example:^15
Web screens may blossom with movies and be garnished with
sound tracks but, for the moment, type is the primary vehicle for
information and persuasion. Its appearance on screen is more
crucial than ever. Intense competition for the user’s attention
means that words must attract, inform (and maybe seduce) as
quickly as possible. Flawless delivery of the message to the screen
is the goal. The road to success is very broad, but the surface rather
uneven.The uneven surface is apparent on many current Web pages. Page
compilers often fail to respect the need for lines to be relatively
short, or fail to appreciate the value of columns. They may overuse
colour and type size, or underuse the variations which are available.
And they can transfer the habits of typing on paper, forgetting
that the HTML conventions (‘Hypertext Markup Language’, which
instructsthecomputerabouthowtolayouttext)maybedifferent.^16
Totakejustoneexample,asimplecarriagereturnisenoughtomark
a paragraph ending on the paper page, but on screen this would
not result in a new paragraph: to guarantee that, the HTML
needs to be inserted into the text at the appropriate point. Erratic
lineation, obscured paragraph divisions, misplaced headings, and
other such errors are the outcome. For the linguist, this complicates
the task enormously, making it difficult to draw conclusions about
the linguistic nature of the medium. The situation resembles that
found in language learning, where learners pass through a stage
of ‘interlanguage’, which is neither one language nor the other.^17
Many Web pages are, typographically speaking, in an ‘in between’
state.
(^15) Pring (1999: 6). He also points out (p. 8) that designers for print have had only some
16 15 years’ experience of dealing with language in a computer-mediated environment.
For a convenient guide to HTML tagging, see<http://www.willcam.com/cmat/html/
17 crossref.html>.
For interlanguage, see Selinker (1972).