Some things I do sloppily, and some things I do with great attention to detail. Consistency in written style is one thing I have try to pay attention to. And yes, I do occasionally correct my friends' blog posts.
Most serious web writers are conscious of style as well, but because we're our own editors and publishers, style tends to vary widely between sites. But as long as we keep our own internal standards, we look like we have at least a clue of what we're doing. And as my 301 lab instructor told us, "style is style and is always right as long as it's consistent." So I feel secure in always spelling out okay, not hyphenating email and ending my sentences with prepositions.
Things like addresses, hyphenation and a.m. and p.m. are easy style decisions, though, because you can find an authority to define their use. What's trickier on the web is the rapidly evolving webspeak, made-up or recently coined terms that no one really knows how to write.
Matt has already mentioned Wired's online style section that accompanies their Wired Style book. They also point to all the other all of the style resources they use. Wired often has a standardized style for the tech terms that get carelessly tossed around online. And only just recently, they made a rather significant announcement:
Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the "I" in internet.At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.
And the internet collectively rejoiced because we'd known the Truth all along. You write radio and television, not Radio and Television. The internet is a medium like the rest of them; it doesn't need a capital letter.
But the whole web versus Web debate is only the tip of the iceberg. Web pages aren't just content, they're the (X)HTML code, too. And all good web authors make sure their markup is nice and consistent, too. The New York Public Library recently released its own online style guide that defines how the code for NYPL websites should be written — although it's not their own standard, but rather widely used XHTML 1.0 Transitional, the same code this website is written in.
If we've got to worry not only about our copy but also our code, style is even more important online than off. And I'd say that if we're coding to the same standards as New York's finest librarians (and their A-list web guru Jeffrey Zeldman), we're doing pretty darn good.
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