Capitol Hill insiders and educational analysts are hopeful that several of the key recommendations made in a Congressional panel's report on web-based learning will be acted upon this year. Last January, I predicted that there would be 300 million people around the world with Internet access by the end of 2000. I'm the first to admit that I was wrong. As of the end of November 2000, there were 407.1 million people with Internet access. We can confidently say that the global Internet population will reach 1 billion by 2005 as user numbers mushroom in Asia and across the developing world.
Bad web righting Good writing is perhaps the most important aspect of a website.
However, because this was not originally recognized, many companies and organizations that put out large quantities of content and are therefore publishers have never bothered to create the kind of editorial infrastructure that a publisher must have. Over a century ago, Oscar Wilde observed that the English and the Americans are two great nations, divided by the same language. That language is now the lingua franca of the Web, and it threatens to divide us even more. The problem for us as writers is that Web English has many dialects, and no single dialect is dominant. What's worse, even longtime Web residents don't always know the dialects of their neighbors.