Dear Dr. Boli: I was looking at a site on the Web and noticing that it claimed to be “carbon neutral.” What does that mean? —Sincerely, Jennifer Granholm.

Dear Madam: In the early days of the Web, all sorts of annoying attention-grabbing decorations were fashionable on primitive HTML pages meant to be displayed in Netscape or Internet Explorer. There was blinking text, there was bold italic underlined big, there were patterned backgrounds that made the text illegible; but most annoying of all were the animated effects, both background and foreground. Of the animated effects, the very most annoying of all was the popular “carbonated” effect that made a pattern of rising bubbles all over the screen. A “carbon-neutral” site is one whose owner has signed a pledge promising that it will never happen again.