nouns - "Home page" or "homepage"?



Is there a convention for the spelling of the name of the main page of a website? Should it be home page, with a space between the two words; or homepage, all one word?



Answer



"Home page" was used first, but "homepage" followed soon after, is also acceptable and I prefer.




  • Homepage was used to refer to the main page of a website as early as July 1993.




  • Home page was used to refer to the main page of a website as early as September 1992.



    • The first web browser was only written (by Tim Berners-Lee) in 1990-1991.




  • Home page was used to refer to the main page of a HyperCard system as early as March 1991.



    • HyperCard was a successful hypermedia forerunner to the WWW.




Style guides


These style guides use homepage:



These style guides use home page:



(More style guides here.)


homepage


The OED has home page from August 1993, and homepage from 1997, however I found homepage in Usenet as early as July 1993.


The first uses both homepage and home page in the same paragraph.


12th July 1993 - sci.astro.hubble - "NASA's Project STELAR announces WWW server for public access" - Archie Warnock:



I am also collecting WWW homepage documents with the intention of making them available through WAIS, as an experiment in combining the search functionality of WAIS with the display and hypertext capabilities of WWW and Mosaic. If you run a WWW server and would like your home page included in this database, just mail the HTML file to me.



The next, from the next day, uses Homepage.html as a filename and also as a standalone noun.


13th July 1993 - comp.infosystems.www - "A possible feature for WWW Options" - Jonathan B. Marder:



What I would like to see is a "tree" of documents visited which shows not only the URLs but also how the document was called. e.g.:-


Homepage.html |---> URL-1 -----> URL-1a 
              | 
              \---> URL-2 -----> URL-2a 
                        | 
                         \----> URL-2b

...and so on. This would be added to throughout the session. Actually, it would be nice if the user could edit in some annotation and save it for use as a future homepage.



home page


Home page can also be antedated in Usenet. The earliest computing use I found is in reference to HyperCard. According to Wikipedia:



HyperCard was an application program and programming tool for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers, that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web.



18th March 1991 - rec.radio.amateur.misc - "Hypercard HamStack Articles Part 2 of 8" - Diana L. Syriac:



If you are using recent ham stacks (Novice and Tech v3.0 or greater or General, Advanced, Extra v2.0 or greater), AND you have not yet entered the Ham Stacks (ie, you're still on the Home page), there's an easier way to get started that is faster (this option stops the automatic random generation of a test).



The first WWW use I found is from the following year.


11th September 1992 - talk.politics.misc and talk.bizarre - "Voice: Issue #1 Out!" - Tom Boutell:



The first issue, which deals with abortion and specifically with the Roe vs. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision's legacy, is now available by the following means:


[...]



  • On the World Wide Web hypertext system (soon). This is a wonderful way to read the magazine, but I haven't heard from the web's maintainer in approximately a month. (If you already use it and are comfortable with making your own links from home pages of your own, write to me and I'll give you the necessary information to link to the magazine.)



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