Comment by somat
4 years ago
Hypercard was the more polished and superior product. However html did several things better than hypercard.
An open and simple file specification. I don't know much about hypercard, was it's file format published?
An open and simple network transport system. html pages could trivially be loaded and linked from anywhere on the network.
The client came with source code and permission to modify it. Very quickly there were several competing implementations. for every operating system.
Yes, good points, but this just shows it wasn't only one thing that made HTML win over hypercard. It did multiple things right, and also was in the right place and the right time to get started. CERN actually had a network that was also used by scientists to exchange documents. Hyperlinks to documents on other computers made sense there. Conquering the desktop in general took a little longer.