Comment by somat
4 years ago
The thing that hypercard completely missed was the hyperlink.
The second thing was that hypercard was a program html was a format.
Another case of worse is better? shrug.
4 years ago
The thing that hypercard completely missed was the hyperlink.
The second thing was that hypercard was a program html was a format.
Another case of worse is better? shrug.
You all probably know this… Contemporary computing behavior is for the cursor to change to a little hand as it rolls over a link or button. This was first introduced by HyperCard, so it is there as an everyday reminder of its legacy.
On the same note, I often wonder why the mouse cursor on so many OSes is identical to the one used on the Macintosh[0]. Did they really all just copy what was in the Macintosh System Software, or was there an earlier pioneer of the typical black arrow with a white outline?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Mac_OS#/media/File:App...
First image in this blog post shows the cursor as it was first(?) seen on an Alto. So, so much of our computing paradigms came from Xerox PARC.
http://www.righto.com/2017/10/the-xerox-alto-smalltalk-and-r...
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To some degree there is only one solution to this problem of arrow cursor design. Vertices, horizontals and 45 degree diagonals render effectively, even on low resolution screens. The arrow head of a mouse cursor consists of: 1 vertical, 1 horizontal, 1 leftward 45 degree diagonal and 1 rightward 45 degree diagonal.
HyperCard absolutely had hyperlinks, and later versions had them in recognizable form before the web did — you could link from an arbitrary range of text in a text field.
You could link to content _in another Stack_ (file) , for that matter. HyperCard absolutely had hyperlinks :) They were just called Buttons, but you could not only directly link to something, but also attach scripting to do additional stuff, pretty much exactly like the <a> tag we use and attach click events to today. I mean, I guess it wasn't like a piece of inline text, but you would just overlay a transparent button. That's a method I used, but there were probably better ways to link text. It was a long time ago, tough to even remember haha
But you could not link to content on another machine. I think that was the thing that made HyperCard obsolete the day HTML arrived.
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The thing html missed out on (which was part of the original vision, to be fair) was using the same program for editing and viewing.
And bi-directional links by way of Ted Nelson
Bi-directional links are a non-starter from the perspective of having an autonomous distributed system.
Think about it this way, would you be happy if any random scammer could place links into your web page, well, with bidirectional links, now they can.
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My recollection is the original graphical browsers were all editors. I’m pretty sure for example ViolaWWW was an editor, and directly referenced HyperCard too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW
Netscape had it for a long time.
But the Hyper in HyperCard literally means hyperlink.