New technology has brought to VIP success and with success came the ability to offer you our employees the best opportunities of work we could ever imagine. But with new technology a new jargon came to our doors.

VIP has adopted its own "house style" to be consistent but always open to bend this rules if clients request to use their own stylebook. In reality, there may never actually be a standardization of Internet jargon as the nature of the Internet invites a lack of standardization. Anyone with the know-how (or the money to pay someone with the know-how) can run a Web site and spell words any way he or she chooses without regard to editorial consistency.

While for some words there are generally-agreed-upon spellings and usages, there are others that are used with less standardization and therefore vary from publication to publication. Most stylebooks and dictionaries agree that the words "Internet" and "Web" (when referring to the World Wide Web) should always be capitalized because they are proper nouns. There is only one Internet and only one World Wide Web.

So here are the most common words and how VIP should use them in any documentation project ( some based on the standard AP stylebook):

- A -

ASCII [tech] - American Standard Code for Information Interchange, use ASCII on all references.

- B -

byte [tech] - computer term for eight bits (binary digits). In the “ancient days” computers had seven-bit bytes. One byte stores one ASCII character, two bytes can store one basic multilingual Unicode character

- C -

cyberspace [tech] - term popularized by author William Gibson, cyberspace is the virtual community created by computer networks. Cyberspace generally refers to digital replacements for “real” objects and experiences.

- D -

data [tech/misc] - plural. Example: The data are inconclusive.

database [tech] - one word. dBase is a trademark for a database system.

dot-com [tech] - preferred in AP style over dot.com, which implied “dot-dot-com” to some readers. Some newspapers and magazines use dot.com or dotcom. The “.com” is a reference to the commercial domains first registered by companies on the Internet. We dislike all of the dot-com uses, preferring to describe a company precisely.

-E-

e-mail [tech] - preferred AP style, E-mail when starting a sentence, though Email and email are preferred by some publications. We prefer e-mail.

e-learning[tech] - E-Learning when starting a sentence.

- H -

HTML [tech] - hypertext markup language, use HTML unless explaining how to create Web pages.

- I -

Internet [tech] - capitalize in AP style. Internetwork is no longer used.

intranet [tech] - lowercase. A network within an organization.

IT [tech] - information technology should be used, unless IT refers to a company department. Business stories may use IT when appropriate.

-J-

Java [tech] - capitalize when referring to Sun Microsystems’ programming language.

- K -

K [tech] - unit of computer memory, kilobyte, equal to 1024 bytes. The value 64K is equal to 65,536 bytes. Notice there is no space between the value and K.

kilohertz [tech] - with a value, use kHz on second reference. Example: 580 kHz.

- O -

online [tech] - not on-line. We prefer online as more readable.

- U -

URL [tech] - Uniform Resource Locator is not required, use URL on all references.

user friendly [tech] - no hyphen.

- V -

Web [tech] - capitalize when discussing the Internet. See World Wide Web