The Language of Digital Genres. A Semiotic Investigation of Style and Iconology on the World Wide Web

The digitalization of communication creates novel answers to familiar questions in the form of digital products. Their often poor record in declaring their purpose still poses a serious problem. What must be done to define the genres of digital products? What must be done to enable the user to identify the genre?Such questions are not new, they are just newly posed for the digital medium, for example art history's merit is to have developed the methods of stylistics (referring to {form}) and of iconology (referring to {content}), which exhaustively identify artifacts. The role of {function} traditionally divides fine arts (form = content; as an end in itself) from the applied arts (form follows function, or the goal of usefulness).On the other hand, semiotics understand products as terms of a language, analyzing it in terms of logic and linguistics. Here too, {function} defines the genre. In our research, we combine the concepts of semiotics (wrt. {function}) and of art history (wrt. {form} and {content}) as follows:= Form refers to style, and to syntax;= Content refers to iconology, and to semantics;= Function refers to role, and to pragmatics.We define a digital genre by referring to its function. We identify a digital genre by considering the relation: Form follows function. We understand that function is servant to content.