Should we still write Internet with a capital 'i'? | Hacker News Reader

Should we still write Internet with a capital 'i'?

thenextweb.com

11 pointsmirceagoia37 comments

I just found an answer to this yesterday:

"An internet (lowercase “i”) is any collection of separate physical networks, interconnected by a common protocol, to form a single logical network. The Internet (uppercase “I”) is the worldwide collection of interconnected networks, which grew out of the original ARPANET, that uses Internet Protocol (IP) to link the various physical networks into a single logical network. In this book, both “internet” and “Internet” refer to networks that are interconnected by TCP/IP."

http://www.morninj.com/2012/03/internet-or-internet/

I like this approach; "I can't access the Internet, my internet connection is down."

Yes, I like this too.

I don't think I've seen an author in the past 10 years use lowercase-internet to mean interconnected networks that are not The Internet, though. I've seen it for some variants, like talking about "internetworking" or "internetworked" facilities, but it's just too confusing to refer to "an internet" when you mean 3 IBM sites networked together.

The term "intranet" is starting to become a common replacement, though; increasingly any network that is not The Internet is being described as such, even if consists of multiple internetworked physical networks. So in the IBM-sites example, I think it would be more common to talk about the "IBM intranet", even if it's global and encompasses multiple networks, than to talk about the "IBM internet".

But isn't intranet the right word if those global multiple networks are internal to IBM and use TCP/IP?

Or have I misunderstood and they're not a proper intranet, but a mish-mash of intranets and the Internet?

The capital is unnecessary for two reasons. First, common parlance does not distinguish any old internet from the global one. From a descriptivist standpoint, the battle is already over. Second, we already use an article to differentiate the two uses: an internet is to a world as the internet is to the world—not the World. Same goes for a web versus the web.

What does bother me is that it’s called the World Wide Web and not the Worldwide Web.

Speaking of which, in this day and age, I find it inexcusable for example.com not to be a valid alias for www.example.com. (Are you listening old media??)

Yeah, I always 301 the “www” subdomain to the real site. Some agree with us[1], some disagree[2], and some disagree disagree[3].

[1] http://no-www.org/

[2] http://www.yes-www.org/

[3] http://www.www.extra-www.org/

The reason you should use a www.domain is because then you can serve static assets from a cookieless domain. If you don't use a www-domain, then you'll be setting cookies at root and they'll populate down to say static.example.com too.

But aren't there other aspects of same-origin policy that could bite you if you outsource static.example.com too?

E.g., it may not stop static.example.com from setting malicious cookies at the root.

> static.example.com from setting malicious cookies at the root.

It does. Subdomains can't set cookies for other subdomains. So long as you don't read root cookies, you'll be fine even if you do put static.example.com on some companies box that gets hacked without your knowledge.

However, outside of hacking (which is an issue no matter how you layout your domains), I can't think of a single problem with www-.

> So long as you don't read root cookies

I wonder how many web apps are coded to reject cookies from a parent domain when they're expecting specific-subdomain cookies?

Now that you mention it... I looked did a little investigation and it turns out you can't tell where a cookie comes from.

document.cookie in javascript just returns a string, and HTTP_COOKIE doesn't have any identifying information.

So yes, you're right. I was wrong. You can get poisoned by cookies on a root and there's really nothing you can do about it except hope that your browser is smart enough to make prefer your good.example.com cookies as opposed to the root cookies set by evil.example.com

> an internet is to a world as the internet is to the world—not the World.

Analogies always fail.

An internet[1] is to a continent as the Internet is to the Earth.

I agree that this argument[2] is thoroughly lost because people rarely use the capital 'I' anymore.

[1] You have all sorts of networks, but a network doesn't become 'an internet' just because it's using TCP/IP.

[2] Perhaps argument is too strong a word.

The analogy was lexical, not semantic. So you’re absolutely right about the logic of it, but logic has little to do with it. And I’m not one for arguing about language. It’s easiest just to point out what people actually do—every day merging with everyday, for instance, or spelling you’re as your. Hell, a lot of people even spell comfortable as comfterble. Or is it alot?

There are people in every generation who bemoan the “downfall” of language, and yet somehow I feel our languages get better over time, not worse—whatever that might mean.

Word.

"I view it like a utility or books" isn't valid justification, it's an horrible misunderstanding that "the Internet" is the name of THIS network. Iran aims to create their own. And surely we'll have others eventually, we just haven't had serious consumer networks yet.

There's already Internet2. It's mostly for academics. My university is a member, so file transfers with some other universities will go REALLY fast.

It's a shame that Google's trends tool doesn't allow us to compare case-sensitive terms. One could scrape through the first N results, but N would be an order of magnitude smaller than what a proper Google implementation could accomplish.

why not just look at the Google Books corpus (ie Google Books n-gram viewer) http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Internet%2Cinte...

I thought we stopped doing that in 1995.

Question:

Does treating the Internet as a proper noun legitimize it relative to nation states? How about the opposite, i.e. does treating it a a regular noun delegitimize it relative to nation states?

I wouldn't think so.

I don't think there are very many people who would consider the internet to be something that would ever be in the same category of thing with nation states such that they could be related. 'The internet', even when used as a metaphor to refer to some collection of humans, is far less tangible and definite compared to a nation state.

For myself: I always use capital I just because there is only one Internet. That doesn't make it more legitimate, or more like a nation state, or anything else. It just highlights the uniqueness of it.

Still? Why would anyone write 'internet' with a capital 'i'? Internetisapropernout.net is just wrong: it's not a proper noun; if it were, why would we precede it with an article?

If we capitalized any noun that referred to a specific thing, every word that followed 'the' would need to be capitalized.

The internet over which I'm posting this comment simply happens not to have a name.

Why is the White House preceded with an article? I don't think it's significant.

I have always capitalized Internet and Web.

If you were at an institution with Internet2 connectivity, "the internet" would be ambiguous in a way "the Internet" isn't, perhaps? Anyone here part of such a group? For most of us though, it makes no difference and it wouldn't be the first time informal and formal usage have differed :)

I think people refer to Internet1 as "the Internet" (because it's bigger) and Internet2 as "Internet2" (or "I2").

Since Internet2 doesn't have different user-facing characteristics, I don't think most researchers distinguish, unless it's their area of research specifically. From a user perspective it just looks like another set of long-haul internet pipes, alongside both the commercial ones run by Level3/etc., and other educational networks like CalREN and NORDUnet. I don't even usually know when my data is being routed over Internet2 or some other network unless I make a point of tracerouting, and often it transparently takes some mixture of routes.

and often it transparently takes some mixture of routes.

Whoa. I always thought it was pretty much separate. Might have to go and hunt down a documentary or something about this, seems an interesting topic.

The basic question is whether or not the word "Internet" is a proper noun (i.e. a specific named entity like the "Interstate Highway System") or just a regular noun like "public highways".

I do still write it with capital "i". What do you think?

I use a lower case "i". These days internet is just a common noun.

The Internet (the iPhone automatically capitalized it for me) is kind of like air - it's ubiquitous, and yet we don't see the word air capitalized.

Yeah, 'air' is another word that's sort of nebulous about its extent.

"The bug in the jar is running out of air" c.f. "Don't pollute the air" (i.e., Earth's atmosphere)

Yes, but "air" is not really comparable, is it? You'd never find someone saying "if we remove the wall from this room, we can make an air", or "you have your air, I have my air, and we should connect them to the Air".

There can be (and are) multiple internets. Hundreds, thousands of internets. There is only one Internet. The people who decide the nomenclature of the technology should be the network engineers who have the knowledge to build it. People who argue for "internet" don't seem to understand how internets work.

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