World Wide Weddings the new trend?

Dear Miss Manners: A friend recently sent me a link to a Web site with information about her niece and her intended who are getting married six months from now. I thought the Web site looked so high tech as to seem like a promo for an upcoming theatrical release. I thought it vulgar – perhaps a bad joke.

It is all so show-biz. I’d enjoy knowing what you think about it.

Gentle Reader: In the years immediately preceding the wedding Web site, invitations sent by mail were so stuffed with directions, hotel choices and sightseeing opportunities that the marriage seemed like merely one choice of amusements among many. For that reason, Miss Manners would consider the Web site a useful improvement. But that is only until she looks at what is stuffed into it.

The unlimited space on the Internet seems to have turned everyone into the person no one wants to sit next to on the airplane. And beyond the general desire to pour out their lives and thoughts to all, lovers are notoriously susceptible to believing that they are the center of the universe.

Of course, they are influenced by show business. Do you think the couple have spent that long engagement gazing at each other? They have been working on the set, the costumes, the makeup, the props and the extras (that’s you, the wedding guests).

So they not only create the promo but include a sort of illustrated fan magazine story about themselves.

True, it is not in the best of taste. But kindhearted people are inclined to indulge them in this on the grounds that they are not, at this moment of their lives, in their right minds. And it is useful to have the map and the hotel list, and easy to make printouts for the computer-less.