During the late 1470's Edward Caxton began printing books in England, which brought about a certain amount of standardization in spelling. The American lexicographer Noah Webster introduced many standardized American spellings with his dictionary in 1828. English spelling continues to evolve, though at a slower pace. Without standardized spelling, the search engines used with multimedia encyclopedias, massive text databases such as ERIC and DIALOG, and the World Wide Web would be nowhere near as useful and efficient as they are today.
We can carry this idea of "spelling" one step further to the evolution of the new visual language of both words and icons used with computer - mediated information today (which includes the Web page you are now reading). The Back, Forward, Home, Print, and Stop icons at the top of the page in Netscape are visual symbols that have just as clear and definite a meaning as the vowels a, e, I, o, and u. Notice that Nestcape still provides the English word translation on the button, but how long will that continue or even be necessary? If Netscape changed the Home icon to look like a Winnebago instead of a little house because one of the company CEO's loves his motorhome, would that constitute a grave "misspelling" in the visual language just as a missing vowel or mangled ending is a spelling error in English? How many million users in how many thousand languages count on these symbols remaining constant or at least close to constant in order to navigate the information superhighway every day? Notice that other symbols such as the icons for Find, zoom, and Print Preview are not yet completely standardized in most applications and don't convey a distinct meaning to an overwhelmingly majority of users.
The foregoing discussion points out two major conflicting needs filled by the languages we as humans use. Standards, especially spellings of words, are becoming increasingly important as standard word lists are increasingly used by search engines to meet the needs of people to find what they need in the massive body of information that is accumulating geometrically. Also in the name of accessibility to information, languages need to be flexible enough to incorporate visual symbols and provide for access to information through innovations such as hypertext linking. Maintaining a delicate balance between these two needs has always been the hallmark of a living language and points up the differences between modern English or Chinese and ancient Greek and Latin, which stopped evolving many centuries ago.