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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

But what's to say it wouldn't have taken the course of HTML/CSS/JS if it ever got similarly popular?

CSS has one of the strangest designs in all of computing. It's simultaneously Turing-complete yet too weak to easily encode many common types of styling. It has practically no abstraction capabilities, no namespacing, and its syntax at every level (selector syntax, Unicode escaping, etc) is different from the other languages it has to interoperate with, for no apparent reason.

I doubt Hypercard would have ever gotten anything like CSS. It was unlikely enough that CSS ended up anything like CSS!

I doubt it. When you made Hypercard stacks you did it in Hypercard. When you make websites, you make them in ... not a web browser.

Except you did make websites in a web browser originally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

Netscape was going to have a built in editor, but they ran out of time, was added in Netscape 3 Gold, and there by default in 4.

Also, modern Dev Tools in all the major browsers are getting close to being full blown IDEs in their own right (again). It's got a full REPL one F12 (or Ctrl+Shift+I) press away. (Plus modern syntax highlighting, element inspection, direct CSS and sometimes JS file modification.)

(Pre-Edgmium, Edge's Dev Tools even shared a bunch of code with VS Code and briefly explored hosting a full VS Code experience.)

Hey, Netscape Composer's how I got my start on this boring but too-lucrative-to-give-up road. I definitely made websites in my browser :-)

$ seamonkey-bin --edit

::ye olde Mozilla Composer appears directly::

No you wouldn't, but you can ;) How high is your tolerance today?

I would, why wouldn't i? If all you need is to write some formatted text with a bunch of images and perhaps a table or two, composer does the job perfectly fine and the page you get works on any server and client with practically zero overhead and resources.

They wouldn't. You would, that's fine, and I made a site with it in the distant past, or I tried. I checked, but if I did actually publish it, archive.org doesn't have that version.

I say tolerance because much more recently I had problems trying to make a chart and tripping over colspan and rowspan stuff. I really just need to sketch the contents out on paper, first...

I'm not sure i understand, your issue with Composer was making a chart? Why would you try to make a chart in Composer, it is a page editor not an image editor, why not make the chart in a tool made specifically for charts and use it as an image? Also what tables and colspan/rowspan have to do with charts?

Sorry, I meant table and started saying so but I cut that part out at some point. I also tried lowriter; editing tables and rows and cells is better, but not by much.

Maybe I'm taking this too literally, but you can code Java in eclipse and web pages in several electron apps. What are you implying?

It is closer to the ideals of smalltalk and LISP (of the '70s) - where there is little or no distinction between the environment in which one writes the software and the environment that the software is run.

This is a fundamentally different way of how the environment works. You could stop a program and access the development environment because that was part of the runtime.

The parent is talking about an integrated environment for development, where that integrated environment is indistinguishable from the language itself.

Examples of this include elisp and emacs, smalltalk and squeak, and to a lesser extent visual studio and C#.

There have been relatively few ecosystems so integrated. Java and Javascript/html/electron apps are notably not like that at all. There is no one "the" environment for coding those, simply several very popular ones.

Yes exactly.

My own take is that Apple should have made a "Hypercard"-like thing the "top layer" of a new operating system. In other words, the entire desktop/windows/buttons interface to the main OS would be itself scripted in Hypercard.

Smalltalk takes this a step further of course by making the whole operating system a live environment. The very UI vocabulary one uses can also double as "programming"

That was the idea behind AppleScript to an extent.

Hmm. Unity scripting sort of works like this if you if ignore the closed source parts. It's kind of nice to edit the editor. At the same time, having the power to corrupt your runtime is arguably more trouble than it's worth.

It was really a thing that could, theoretically, have taken the course of Director or Flash. You can imagine a parallel universe where that happened and my guess is the final result would have been the same.

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