HTML in the context of language variation and change
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2004
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
The World Wide Web is a major technological advance that has profoundly
changed the way people live, in a manner that was unprecedented at the time of its
invention in 1989. The underlying code that makes it work, that allows webpages to
display properly is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which, naturally, is no older
than the environment for which it was created. Over the course of almost fifteen years-a
substantial amount oftime in the context of hi-tech advances-HTML has faced issues of
variation and standardization that fit in with natural language change and evolution. I will
make the argument that HTML allows us insight into the process of language variation
and is a case in point of language change inevitability.
HTML has expanded from a simple markup language to include new features and
visual formatting capabilities rather quickly by any measure, much less from the
viewpoint of a historical linguistics field that covers decades and centuries at a time. It
can be seen as language evolution in a highly compressed nutshell. I will outline the
reasons for and implications of this phenomenon.
Section 2 covers the origins of HTML and the mentality under which the World
Wide Web was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee that deliberately made HTML more
flexible and open than computer programming languages and more like natural language.
Section 3 details some common language change phenomena that HTML has faced or undergone, such as lexical and semantic change and language planning, as well as
mention of similar phenomena which HTML cannot undergo because of its inherent
differences with natural language. This section includes the problems unique to HTML
from being reliant on browsers to render it. Section 4 explains the impact ofthe Web
standards movement and the direction in which the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
is steering HTML, and the increasing compliance of the major browser companies to
Web standards. Section 5 examines the future ofHTML as the stricter XHTML and
possibly the end of the linguistic free-for-all that characterized the state of HTML in the
1990s. Section 6 draws the conclusions and analyzes this moment in history when a
computer language acted just a little bit human.