So, What Does "HREF" Stand For, Anyway? | Hacker News Reader

So, What Does "HREF" Stand For, Anyway?

tomayko.com

159 pointsiamelgringo70 comments

"10 years" working with HTML? No wonder he didn't know. My first web browser was Mosaic, running via Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.11 on a 14.4k modem. (This was in '94, I think). Back then, we all knew what hypertext was, because the term was in common use, and the default background for web pages was a lovely #C0C0C0.

It's totally a generation gap thing. Just a few years difference and so much is taken for granted. My joints feel sore just thinking about it. I'm going to listen to some ABBA, now...

Completely agree. But I'm sure we have our equivalents -- I was writing a blog post about SQL the other day and realized I couldn't remember if it stood for Standard Query Language or Structured Query Language (it's the latter, but doesn't it feel like the former makes more sense?).

There isn't much standard about (implemented) SQL: http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/ - so... ;-)

Well it sure as hell isn't structured... I mean, crap is just tacked onto the end of statements any old how :-)

I discovered, much to my surprise, that Andy Beaulieu (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/789) insists (without any justification that I can see) that it is neither: http://books.google.com/books?id=1PgCCVryjOQC&lpg=PP1....

Haha Trumpet Winsock, that was so hard to get installed sometimes. I remember when you had to edit the startup files to get it working correctly and it was a bitch because you couldn't get much help as you couldn't get on the Internet forums...

Man. The web was barely used in 1991, which seems very not-that-long-ago.

I was born in 1988, so it's strange to me to imagine life without the web. I eventually want to be in an environment where I'm surrounded by the grandmasters of those older eras, to learn the lessons they learned; lessons that can only be taught after decades (plural) of engineering experience.

The true whitebeards make most programmers like us look like middle school Lego programmers.

Or elementary school turtle programmers. Anyone else that relates to that reference is also officially old.

Thank you, I really needed that. :(

My elementary school teacher was very confused by my LOGO programs - they produced no graphic output. I mostly wrote bizarre choose-your-own-adventure IF. It was pretty bad.

(b. 1978; I'm in the net.legends file, to my eternal shame)

so are you a 32-year old C/Lisp wizard now? ;)

side-note: very few people know turtle is built-in to Python

>>> import turtle

OMG Turtles! I seem to recall the cursor actually being a turtle. I'd re-skin them as buildings and spaceships, and crash them into each other with scripted animation commands. Is that the same thing?

Heh, it was still taught until a few years ago here (Uruguay).

I remember it from 1990, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's still taught in some schools.

I would not exactly call us whitebeards, I was 17 when the web was invented and was already on the net. I am 35 now, not exactly over the hill, I may be an old dude to some of you young guys, but to me the whitebeards are the COBOL guys form the 60-70s.

On another note, an interesting bit of trivia is that the web was invented on a NeXT box and the first group of developers to jump on to web development (me included) generally opted for NeXT boxes as their development platform of choice. If you where to have looked at that snap shot in time, you would have though NeXT was going to rule the web development world. I think it is a strange twist of fate that it did not and now some how through a twisted chain of events, NeXT (OSX) is again a lot of web developers system of choice.

No, I meant whitebeards. The NASA programmers, Kernighan/Richie, etc.

In those days, you'd use FTP a lot. And Archie, a search engine for FTP sites. IRC and usenet also existed as popular ways of online communication before the web, and email of course ;-). Somewhat later Gopher servers came into being, and you could use Veronica to search gopherspace.

Not to mention MUDs.

Which, perhaps surprisingly, are still alive and well to this day:

http://www.mudconnect.com/

Incidentally I was an advertising major until I found MUDs in 93 and practically failed out of the program. I switched to CS so I could learn to make my own, and here we are 17 years later...

There was also WAIS, which was interesting in it own respect. you would open "databases" across the net and search for info that you where interested in. A lot of counterculture stuff was available as well as a lot of good programming documents. The process got pretty cumbersome after the net expanded past the universities and government establishments. It did not scale well.

To the GP poster. I can remember a time before the net (it seems like yesterday) and back then we had local BBS services that some tech guy, in the local community, usually ran. There where also some regional and national BBS networks. They would advertise them in the back of DR. Dobb's and some of the other computer hobbyist magazines.

In some ways, that was a cooler time to be into computing, everything was new, everything was exclusive because it took some technical know how to get onto these networks. Small things where groundbreaking developments back then. Computers where slow so you had to be resourceful and creative when developing.

Don't get me wrong, I love where we have come, but back then there was a sense of being part of a revolution, it may just have been because, I was a little younger than you are now, but it seemed so much more fascinating back then.

Eventually? Dude. Look around you, virtually speaking.

And the most upvoted message from them: lmgtfy.

Anyone else already know 'hypertext reference'? Like that's what they read when they made first made web pages in the 90s, and they've never heard any different, or realized this was a mystery?

Yup, I was slightly surprised that it's not more widely known.

It always seemed logical to me; I never heard anyone actually "say" it (or write it) but it seemed logical that "ref" stood for "reference" and "h" stood for hypertext - since links point to URI's and back then the only linkable resources were hypertext documents instead of server side scripts/CGI.

I took one look at that huge text and smiled. Readability without the extra click to run the bookmarklet. Thank you.

I really like his design sense.

This has inspired me to use larger fonts when I rebuild/redesign my personal site.

I went back to click my Readability bookmarklet just for fun, it actually looked worse.

People working on the web for 10 years don't know what HREF stands for? I take back all the good things I've said about 'em youngsters ;D

I knew what it stands for, so you can still say good things about me.

You have to understand, we've lived and worked on the web our entire adult lives. We don't necessarily know what href stands for any more than we know what 'goodbye' is a contraction of. But we know what it means.

Upvoted because I'd never even thought about the word goodbye ("Of course, it means 'may this bye be good'!"). Fortunately wiktionary had the answer: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/goodbye

Pretty interesting. (And obviously, bye is just a shortened form of goodbye.)

Yeah I was just playing

Most of these youngsters probably haven't heard of Hypercard either. Links before HTML... (but they were local)

Too bad there's no Hypercard app for the iPad. That could be fun if done right.

Link to original WWW source is interesting:

http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/Hyper...

I'm not sure what makes me sadder: the fact that people don't just automatically know this, or the fact that I'm so old that I do.

It's probably the latter. Everyday it seems something that I've just always known enters the realm of obscure and arcane. Soon I'll be having a hard time keeping up with the new. Oh well.

I know exactly how you feel. My reaction was, "Isn't that obvious?" I remember when the term hypertext was all the rage, and when it was by no means certain that the Internet was the fabled "information superhighway" where all the data in the world would be cross-linked. I was born in '73, so I imagine I am right on the cusp of those who would have had personal knowledge of this, and those who would be too young to have cared at the time.

Interesting. The glossary at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_2.html#GLOSS19 defines hyperlink as

"a relationship between two anchors, called the head and the tail. The link goes from the tail to the head. The head and tail are also known as destination and source, respectively."

So what we have is "Anchor Head REFerence" when we should simply have "Link DESTination". Think about it when you next design a world changing markup language.

It always meant "retaining backwards compatibility at the cost of deprecated names" to me.

We should have told him HREF was a Macintosh type, creator or resource identifier code.... Those were 4 characters in length and there very well could be one by that name, and quite possibly much older than HTML. I searched for a list of the codes, but found a database that needs a password. "Shareware" like that should be called keyware. I remember when shareware was a voluntary contribution for something that worked... not this locked keyware demoware stuff.... /endrant

Looking around more, it looks like HREF really is/was a Macintosh resource type... but it is still a URL. Basically it's a text track in a Quicktime movie that contains a URL.

To make this interesting enough for you guys to read, here it is described in terms of being used as a Quicktime-based exploit!

http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/backdooring-quicktime-movies/

So after 10 or so years of html experience, the guy can't google for "href wikipedia"?

At least HREF makes sense. "Anchor"...?

It attaches you to part of a page. Like an anchor moors your boar to part the pier.

I'm never going sailing with you, if that's what you use an anchor for! An anchor holds you (sort of, if you're lucky) to the seabed.

In coastal waters.

Otherwise when you want to slow your boat relative to the wind you use a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_anchor , the most common use of which is in heavy weather.

Hehe. You're right of course. I guess I think if it as a way of stopping the boat.

No it doesn't, it redirects you to another page or part of a page. Never made sense to me either.

It's because link is too long ... oh wait ...

It's always meant "hyperreference" to me.

I don't like this new trend of people making blog posts and comments about questions that can be answered in 30 seconds with a Google search.

The author describes his efforts to find the information in existing sources, e.g. the HTML spec and DTD. He didn't manage to, and experts who were party to the original discussions pitched in with comments.

You should link to the search that provides the same results. You can even use lmgtfy.com if you're feeling bitchy. I'd say Ryan Tomayko knows how to use Google; did you do any background on him?

By your logic, Wikipedia should just link to searches too; but then it wouldn't be Wikipedia.

http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Ahref

4th one down "hypertext reference ..." unless I guessed wrong?

You did guess wrong - it seems to be 'head reference' actually. As the article explains, the original links were conceptualized with two anchors, the 'head' and the 'tail', and 'href' is the reference to the head of the link.

Don't tell me I'm going to have to RTFA?

IIRC, with respect to hypertext as a concept rather than specific HTML specs/implementations, hyperlinks were sometimes envisioned (implemented?) as being bi-directional references. As such, you needed an element on each end of the reference that pointed to the other end.

In thinking of "href" as "head reference", you are providing a URI (possibly also a target URL) from your source document -- the tail -- to the intended destination, the head.

I'm unclear what this looks like from the head's perspective. Is the tail/head distinction absolute, or relative and dependent upon the current document's perspective? If absolute, then the tail might be viewed as the link's instantiator.

The author says 'after 10 years' with HTML, which isn't very long.

Ask someone working in hypertext long enough to know what VERONICA stands for -- they'll know what HREF means!

But funny you mention Wikipedia. Looks like it has the answer:

> with the attribute "href" (HREF is an abbreviation for "Hypertext REFerence"[3])

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink

> [3] Tim Berners-Lee, Making a Server ("HREF" is for "hypertext reference")

http://www.w3.org/Provider/ServerWriter.html

Funny how these things work:

http://img.skitch.com/20100806-n839s48kxx3gq6ae3m7ru45t6j.pn... http://img.skitch.com/20100806-dy2ghicjxgac7dpmdd2pwhdntc.pn...

How is that those questions get answered through Google searches? Because people took the time to write posts that answer a specific question just like this one.

There's absolutely no way for your claim to be true unless the information is only found on blog posts. Decently crafted Google queries easily return the primary source (which is not a blog post).

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aw3.org+href+...

During the discovery process, just replace "hypertext reference" with whatever you suspect HREF to stand for. The grandparent post is absolutely correct in criticizing these types of blog posts.

Except none of that stuff was indexed by google at time of writing. The links that were added to Wikipedia after the article was published made your search possible:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hyperlink#what_does_href_s...

Trust me. The whole reason the article exists was because there was no clear answer through search/wikipedia/w3c/etc.

You're right. I did not realize your blog post was from 2008 (I falsely assumed it was a recent post). I based my assertions off of the fact that Google has a cache of the page in question dating back to July 1st 2010: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a6pIrYo.... Unfortunately, it is too late to edit my original comment to remove my inaccuracies. Thanks for digging this information up. :)

It was clear what it stood for back in 1997. We must have went through some sort of very minor Dark Ages around 2008 which only plunged knowledge of HREF into darkness, but left everything else intact. :)

The article was written in 2008.

It was the top Google result for a question my wife asked me as she was learning html. I learned something from it, so I posted it here.

An entire blogpost that can be summarized by google 'define:href'

and our collective response could be summarized as RTFM. :)

I think learning what HTTP, HTML and HREF stood for were one of the first things I learned back in the mid/late 90's when getting into web programming. Since H stood for hypertext in both HTTP and HTML I think a reasonable person would guess it also stood for that in HREF.

Next you kids will be asking where the word "car" came from (vehicular not Lisp), and whether Paul McCartney was ever part of a band.

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