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Comment by nostrademons

2 days ago

The Web was significantly influenced by HyperCard. Tim Berners-Lee's original prototypes envisioned it as bidirectional, with a hypertext editor shipping alongside the browser. In that sense it does live on, and serves as the basis for much of the modern Internet.

6 comments

nostrademons

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ebcode  1 day ago

IIRC, the mouse pointer turning into a hand when you mouse over something clickable was original to HyperCard. And I think Brendan Eich was under a heavy influence of HyperTalk when created JavaScript.

  • jjcob  1 day ago

    JavaScript felt like it took the best parts of C (concise expressiveness) and the ease of use of HyperTalk (event handlers, easy hierarchical access to objects, etc). It was pretty sweet.

  • Tabular-Iceberg  1 day ago

    Wasn't the pointer always a hand in HyperCard?

    • WillAdams  1 day ago

      Depended on context, and what the stack programmer set it to. Possibilities (per Fig. 51-1 in _The Complete Hypercard Handbook, 2nd edition_ were:

      - watch

      - busy

      - hand

      - arrow

      - iBeam

      - cross

      - plus

snickerbockers  1 day ago

I honestly don't think the modern web is a legitimate hypertext system at this point. It was already bad enough 20 years ago with flash and serverside CGI but now most of the major websites are just serving JavaScript programs that then fetch data using a dedicated API. And then there's all the paywalls and constant CAPTCHA checks to make sure you aren't training an LLM off their content without a license.

Look up hyperland, it's a early 90s documentary by Douglas Adams and the guy from doctor who about the then-future hypermedia revolution. I can remember the web resembling that a long time ago but the modern web is very far removed from anything remotely resembling hypertext.