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 ) and of iconology (referring to ), which exhaustively identify artifacts. The role of 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, defines the genre. In our research, we combine the concepts of semiotics (wrt. ) and of art history (wrt. and ) as follows: ( style ( syntax; ( iconology ( semantics; ( role /encoding ( pragmatics. We define a digital genre by referring to its and we identify a digital genre by considering the rules "form follows function"; "function follows content".