Writers note: This may be incorrect in terms of timescales, but for the point I wish to make it doesn’t really matter.
A few years ago, when something was to be done on the computer and the makers wanted to sound ‘hip and cool’, they would put an E in front of it. Sometimes a capital E, sometimes a lower case e, sometimes with a – , other times without, and in one case that I remember, even the € symbol was used. The word ‘email’ has had many similar permutations, e-mail, email, E-mail, eMail* and soforth.
Then Apple came along with the iPod (actually, I believe the iMac came first), and since then, the E has been replaced with an I. Even the BBC have succombed to it with the iPlayer. People who want to sound ‘hip and cool’, or ironic, put a lower case ‘i’ in front of their product name, for instance I could start calling this website iStupid or something like that. Don’t worry, I won’t – for a start it’s too much work.
In 1997**, Microsoft introduced a HTML tag that was, as is often the way with Microsoft, suitable for Internet Explorer, has since been extended to pretty much all browsers, and while it has been depreciated in the latest version of HTML, is still widely used, both on older sites which haven’t been updated since 1997 (I believe I made a post about that a while ago talking about ‘large’ images) but also on new sites. It can be quite a useful thing really, and I will readily admit that I am currently working on a site that will use this tag. The tag is, of course, the inline frame, or ‘iframe’ or ‘IFRAME’.
Or, and this brings me onto the point of this post (if there was one), the ‘iFrame’.
This has probably been going on for a long time (this question to Yahoo! Questions was posted, according to YQ, 9 months ago) but the first I heard of it was about a week ago when a post containing this snippet was posted to the Creative Commons mailing list:
If I include SA content within an iFrame in my course (with no modifications), that would seem to not require my entire course to be SA?
To be honest, it is probably just as well that the inline frame is being depreciated. Otherwise, thanks to Apple, we will have a generation of websiters who think that it is an iFrame.
The only advantage as far as I can see, and to be honest, it really doesn’t bother me (honestly!) is that if it continues, Apple will, in a possible reverse of fortune, be credited for the creator of the inline frame because of the preceeding ‘i’. Possibly.
I may be speaking nonsense.
Footnotes:
* The most irrititating use of this that I know of is that all emails sent from work to external email addresses still refer to them as ‘eMails’ in the disclaimer. This means, to me, that there are certain aspects of the IT department at work which are still stuck in the mid 90s. I cannot pinpoint when the term was generally agreed to be ‘email’ with no silly capitals, but it hasn’t been the case for many years now. Also, I remember reading a while ago how disclaimers to emails were generally pointless and, despite many containing threat of legal action, not legally binding.
** Even though at the beginning I said that dates weren’t accurate, this date is (or at least, according to Wikipedia.)
