Introduction - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 7

1.3 Notational Conventions

In order to aid the reader, this topic employs a number of notational conventions.
In particular, we only use “double” quotes to quote a particular author or other
work. When a new word is introduced and used in an unusual manner to be clarified
later, we use 'single' quotes. The use of 'single' quotes is also used when a word is
supposed to be understood as the word qua word, a mention of the word, rather than
a use of the word. When a term is defined, the word is first labeled using bold and
italic fonts, and either immediately followed or preceded by the definition given in
italics . Mathematical or formal terms are italicized , as is the use of emphasis in
any sentence. Finally, the names of topics and other works are often italicized.
In general, technical terms like HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) are often
abbreviated by their capitalized initials. The World Wide Web is usually referred to
as the Web. One of the largest problems is that this whole area historically has had
a rather ad-hoc use of terms, so we hope this fairly rigorous notational convention
helps separate the use, mention, definition, and direct quotations of terms.