4.5.2 HTML source code

The world wide web exercises a similarly subtle form of control over the ways web authors can create their texts. Yates (1996) notes that the source code (the ‘building blocks’ of a website which users arrange to create their pages) is in English, because the technology was developed in the United States and the vast majority of web users are still in the USA and Europe. Speakers of other languages wishing to create websites, therefore, are forced to do this at least partially through English, even if their actual website is displayed in another language. The same can be said for most computer code.