Ivey, Keith C.

Fonts on the Web

One of the original ideas behind the Web is that readers should have control over how things look, since only they know what color combinations, point sizes, and so on they find easiest to read on their particular combination of hardware and software. That said, there's a difference between designing for the World Wide Web, where your documents can be read by anyone, and designing for an intranet, an internal network that's accessible only to people within your organization. On an intranet, you can (theoretically) know exactly what hardware and software your readers are using, so you can control the look to a much greater extent.

Handling Internet Addresses in Text

How to present complete and intelligible Internet addresses and where to break long strings of letters, digits, punctuation, and symbols on the page.

Links: What's Kosher?

If your organization has a Web site, it can be useful to see who else has made links to your site. By tracking down those links, you can find out what people are saying about your site, what pages are particularly useful, and how people are finding your site.

The Curse of Yocto

Several years ago, four new prefixes, for representing very large and very small measurements, were introduced into the International System of Units (Système International d'Unités, or SI): yotta, zetta, zepto and yocto.

Figuring Out the Definition

How can a homograph be the same as a heterograph? And how can heterograph, which comes from roots meaning 'different writing,' be applied to a word that differs in every way except the way it is written?

Scientific Style Manual Aspires to International Scope

Despite what some U.S. editors may see as flaws or debatable recommendations, sooner or later anyone who edits scientific writing will consult Scientific Style and Format. Some may disagree with its style conventions, but they can be defended as serving the editors' stated goal of achieving a uniform international style for scientific publications.

Beyond Gutenberg

Editing must change for the Web, but perhaps not so much as you think. In paper publishing, different documents require different rules and procedures: An annual report requires more editing and more attention to detail than an office memo. Similarly, not all Web documents are equal.

Catching Errors in Internet Addresses

Internet addresses have been proliferating in publications, and they're not going to go away. Editors unfamiliar with the Net may see these addresses as incomprehensible blocks of characters that can't be understood or analyzed into components. But learning a little about their structure can help prevent you from publishing erroneous addresses.

Cookies: Just a Little Data Snack

To read the New York Times Web site, you must open a free user account and log in each time you visit. That means yet another user name and password to remember. Fortunately, if you always use the same computer, you can set up your account so that you're logged in automatically whenever you connect to the site. The site does that by using cookies -- another of those silly-sounding bits of programmers' vocabulary that have crept into mainstream coverage of the Internet. But over the past year or so, this practice has become controversial because some people view it as an invasion of privacy. Others have bought into rumors or read inaccurate press reports suggesting that cookies threaten the security of their hard drives.

Of Robots and a New Search Engine

On July 1995, shortly after the EEI Web site opened, it began to be accessed by a computer named scooter.pa-x.dec.com . At first I thought that someone at Digital Equipment Corporation had an extraordinary interest in editorial subjects, but it soon became clear that Scooter was a robot, a computer program set up to retrieve Web pages. In some months, Scooter accessed more of our pages than any other visitor. I was curious, but since it wasn't doing any harm, I never investigated it. On December 15, 1995, the AltaVista Web site opened, and we finally got to see what Scooter had been up to.

Taking Words to the Bank

Lexicographers call a collection of writing and speech samples used to analyze words, meanings, grammar, and usage a corpus. Since 1991, Cobuild (a special division of HarperCollins Publishers in Glasgow) and the University of Birmingham, England, have been working together to assemble an electronic corpus. The intent was to acquire contemporary (post-1975) samples that illustrate the everyday English most people read, write, and speak.

Loose Ends: Standards and Styles

Several readers have sent me e-mail comments and questions recently that might be of interest to others. (Even Eye readers who don't spend much time on the Web tell us they're interested in picking up this kind of information.)

Unicode: Making the Web Safe for Furriners

I think that Internet and World Wide Web are capitalized because they are proper names. Many names are capitalized common nouns: the White House, the Ninth Circle of Hell, the Heritage Foundation, the Civil War. I've heard arguments for lowercasing Internet and World Wide Web from people who compare them to things like the telephone system, but lowercase is certainly not the predominant style for these terms. At least 90 percent of the time, they're capitalized, and I don't think you should ignore actual use completely.

Encryption Basics Decrypted

Most people sending e-mail nowadays take no steps to prevent their messages from being intercepted. That's fine for many types of messages, but just as there are written messages that you wouldn't want to put on a postcard and would prefer to have protected by an envelope, there's a need for encryption in electronic communication. Besides, encryption can do more than keep things secret. The concepts on which encryption is based can be difficult, and most of the complication is handled behind the scenes by software. Nevertheless, it's useful to have a general understanding of how encryption works. Encryption software (often part of a Web browser or server, e-mail client, or other program) is built around the use of a special number, called a key, to convert information into a form that can be read only by someone who has the key needed to decrypt it.

Citing Internet Sources

Citation styles for Internet publications are still evolving. Printed style manuals offer little guidance, and few even mention the World Wide Web. But that's no excuse for failing to credit your sources.

Open-Source Software: Gaining Ground

Have you ever run across a bug in your word processor that interfered with your work? Or perhaps you've wished that your graphics program had a certain feature that would make your life easier. With most commercial software, you're at the mercy of the company that created it. All you can do is call the technical support line, explain the situation, and hope that there's a work-around or that your issue will be addressed whenever the next version is released. With proprietary software, the company owns the software and doesn't allow anyone else to modify it or even see the source code -- the human-readable (well, programmer-readable) instructions used to create the executable file that the computer runs. Some people have likened such software to a car with the hood locked shut so that only the manufacturer can service it. But with open-source software, you have other options because you have the source code. If you have the knowledge, you can modify the program yourself. If not, you can hire a programmer to make the changes you want.

Untangling the Web: Hoaxes, Scams, and Rumors

If you've had an e-mail address for long, you've probably received a message (forwarded through a long chain of people) warning you about some dangerous computer virus that can infect your computer through e-mail. Some warnings even say that the virus will physically damage your hard drive or monitor. But they aren't true.

Going International

For many people, setting up a Web site is their first experience with publishing documents for an international audience. It's true (for now) that most of the computers on the Internet are in the United States, but the Net includes computers in more than a hundred countries. If you put information on the Web, people from all over the world can read it. At least 15 percent of the visitors to the EEI Web pages are from outside the United States. In the first few days of the new year, pages were viewed by people from two dozen countries, including Croatia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. It's not called the World Wide Web for nothing.