I would like to share with you in a little celebration I am having (still, like a year after the fact.) The “Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World.” was released in the summer of 2010. It was the progressive reference alternative to the archaic AP Stylebook and it made me happy, but there were still those Journalism majors that just couldn’t conform without the “official” guide. Well, in March 2011, the AP Stylebook finally came to it’s senses and “officially” amended 2 of my biggest editorial pet peeves; Web site and e-mail…
Q: Others use one word for Internet-related terms. How about AP?
A: AP style is email 
(changed from e-mail), but other e- words are hyphenated: e-commerce and e-book. Our amended style is website (one word, lowercase w), along with other compounds: webcam, webcast, webmaster. The Web is capped as a short form of World Wide Web, as are Web page 
, Web feed.
Q: How about using e- as a prefix for new terms in the tech and business worlds?
A: AP uses hyphenated e- for generic terms such as e-commerce and e-strategies. One exception: email (no hyphen, which reflects majority of usage). For company names, use their preference: eBay.
As you can see the AP still has a bit of growing to do still to please me completely… It will always be ecommerce and web page to me. Ecommerce with the dash I can live with, but Web page with the capitalized W is completely caveman. I guess we can’t expect to win them all, at least not all at once, otherwise what would I have to celebrate next year?
