Citing web pages

When you use a particular document (web page, book, article) as a significant source of information or ideas, you need to cite it. (In fact, if you use it even as a trivial source of information, you may want to cite it to give weight to your assertion of that information.) To cite a web page, use a format something like this:
Alvestrand, Harald.  "IAB Commentary: Architectural Concerns on the use of DNS Wildcards".  http://www.iab.org/documents/docs/2003-09-20-dns-wildcards.html, 19 September 2003.
It is common with web pages to have to guess the date and the author. If you cannot guess the individual author, you can attribute the web page to the organization promulgating the web page if this seems reasonable (e.g. in this case the Internet Architecture Board).

The date is an essential part of citing a web page, because web pages are frequently edited. In the absence of any date information, you should state the date on which you retrieved the web page, labelled as such (e.g. "as retrieved on 7 October 2005").

The title, also, might be tricky. In the case of this particular web page cited above, the actual <TITLE> tag (what appears in the menu bar, bookmarks, etc) says "Internet Architecture Board - IAB Documents". That does not seem to be the title of this article, but rather some generic text used for that section of their web site. The text which is prominently featured at the beginning of the web page in a large font seems to be the title, in a traditional magazine or newspaper style.

It is not usually necessary, in my opinion, to state that it is a web page. People recognize "http://" these days. You might consider your target audience, and the formality of your writing, in deciding this issue.

[main course page]