Academic referencing of Internet-based resources

The rapid growth of the Internet has outstripped conventions for citing material from that source. Distinguishing material as a [computer file] does not provide sufficient information about the platform necessary for reading it. The URL provides useful information, but augmenting it with other details such as author and date not only provides a more meaningful citation, its similarity to conventional bibliographical notation lends a greater degree of legitimacy in academic discourse. The article considers information derivable from the URL, and HTML documents (including non-displayed source text), in order to derive bibliography and in-line text citations for various kinds of material. The conventions proposed are also applicable to Gopher, FTP, Usenet News, journals distributed by listservers, and email.