Misuse of the term "Home Page"

When Tim Berners-Lee first came up with the ideas for the World-Wide Web, one of the features that was a distinct difference from other documentation systems was that there wasn't a single central page. You could start anywhere and navigate around from there. But, he needed a term for where an individual would go to start from, and he came up with the term "Home Page" to refer to an individual's base of operations for exploring the web. This was a specific place that you could configure in your browser (in fact, there was a convention that all of the earliest browsers used for how a user would specify this) and there would be some quick, simple way to go there, so if you ever got lost, you could return to a known spot. Thus a "Home Page" was a single individual's choice for where they wanted to begin.

But, over the years, anyone wanting a way to distinguish a specific page has picked on this term as a convenient designation. But the main page of a company's web site isn't a "Home Page" unless some individual somewhere has so chosen it, and then it's the "Home Page" only for that user. It might be nice if a set of terms for distinguished pages could be agreed upon, but it's probably too late for that. Here are the terms, that I like to use:

• Home Page: Is an individual's choice for a start location. I also use the term Start Page for this in some contexts. In the browser I use there's a little icon of a house that I can click on and it goes to my Home Page. But, in fact, I don't use this that often since I have configured my window manager to have a menu of the places I go often, and I usually start out with one of those.
• Main Page: Is the page on a site of related pages that can be used as a good starting point. This is usually at the URL that's the root of the site heirarchy (although it needn't be, it's just eaier to refer to if it is).