

Ask HN: Is "the web" an anachronism? - niels_olson

I edit medical research papers. On occasion, an author will cite a URL, e.g.,<p>&#62; the investigators used the calculator for pancreatic fistula and DGE using the ISGPS definition on the Web (http://pancreasclub.com/calculator/)<p>I routinely change this to "on the Internet". While these authors are invariably citing port 80, certainly few sites with "www" actually participate in WWW consortium activities. What does the CS community do?
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sp332
The Internet is a communications network. It carries email, IRC, ssh, and HTTP
etc. The WWW is a hyperlink network. It consists of linked documents. They're
not really the same thing (although everyone knows what you mean if you use
them interchangeably informally).

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prodigal_erik
It's a good shibboleth to distinguish posers from people who actually know how
the web works. I wouldn't lose respect for a clinical researcher merely for
not knowing better than the general public, provided they aren't working on
electronic medical record-keeping. But as an author I'd be offended if an
editor tried to make me look kind of clueless when I'm actually not.

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niels_olson
Thanks, I actually edit translations from Japanese, so massaging word choice
is very much in my lane for these jobs. I'm trying to make the authors look as
competent as possible.

