Think of the kittens!

A tweet:

doctorow Cory Doctorow Dear #BBC: Every time a newsreader says "Internet website," the #W3C kills a kitten. PLEASE THINK OF THE KITTENS!

I have a horrible suspicion that this is a serious point, despite the veneer of camouflage whimsy. 

What is the complaint here anyway?


Is it the tautology? The "web" in "website" nowadays is shorthand for "world wide web". And that web is only world wide because it uses the internet. Well, yes. I can see the point: it is a sort of laziness that does not belong in the BBC, but I would have thought that any kitten killing would have been done by the shade of Lord Reith rather than the W3C.


Or is he detecting a confusion between,  as it were, the wiring and the coding - the body and the soul - of the great enterprise that binds the global village together? That battle was lost as soon as the infant dubdubdub was released to the wild and captured the heart of the world. Even those of us who have struggled (vicariously) through GCSE ICT and understand the technical difference difference also know that in reality, "it's on the internet" and "it's on the web" mean exactly the same thing (even if the simplifications we choose to make in interpreting the words may be subtly different). Furthermore, I would hope that the W3C would take a quiet pride in it's role in building a system so frictionless that users need neither know nor care about the underlying concepts.


I have more sympathy with a concern over attribution. The Internet was the creation of the scary and faceless military-industrial complex (ARPANET, SKYNET, etc). Whereas the www was the creation of a comforting academic with a name, face and everything. 


Everything? Not quite. No patent. Foreseeing its impact, he was content to give it to the world. A stunning rebuke to the culture of ownership.


Thanks, Sir Tim.


And Happy 20th Birthday, WWW.