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Comment by mkramlich | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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...

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.

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