This is incorrect and I'm convinced that you agree after you think it little more. HyperCard was tool for non-programmers. Like spreadsheet. Web is not alternative to HyperCard. You have to learn web programming to do anything.
We should not get over it, but create replacement or recreate it.
But as with all simple things in tech, there are more people whose pay depends on complexity. And so Web 2.0 rose and CSS+JavaScript became what it is today.
(If anything, it's easier today to build a circa-2005 style site than it was in 2005! The native API has grown up enough that you don't need jQuery any more, and honestly good riddance.)
The trouble with the circa-2005 web is that it wasn't actually all that simple. You still had similar complexity to what people do today, but not very many ways to make that complexity manageable. So it was very easy to create situations in which things went wrong a lot and you couldn't really figure out why - something I think the rosy glow of nostalgia easily obscures, these days.
My early career, in hindsight, really was built on dealing with that kind of "unfixable" complexity, finding ways to reduce or replace it or at least make it more manageable - if often just in self-defense, as I typically was also largely responsible for maintaining the same stuff I built. The "capstone project" of that phase was something that we would today describe as an SPA, built in 2011 when the concept barely existed - I hadn't set out to (re)invent that wheel, nor did I even understand until a few years later that that was what I had done, but I found my way to it as the only reasonable option for coping with the essential complexity of the user interaction it expressed, and it worked really well!
That work was for one of our biggest contracts, which we were at risk of losing if I didn't find a way to fix their broken and unusable registration process. It would probably have sunk the company if I'd failed. Reworking it into an SPA avant la lettre solved the problem and saved the contract, and it was some of the hardest work I've ever done precisely because, at that time, there were no tools to help manage all that complexity. It's only gotten easier since then, as successive frameworks have built on prior work in removing accidental complexity and making essential complexity easier to express and manage.
Yes, today's tools are themselves more complicated than jQuery or whatever, sure. That's fair. You need to spend more time learning how to get the most out of them, that's also true. But the tools also do more, and largely do it in ways that are worth having.
A Bridgeport mill takes a lot more learning than a chisel, too, and you can do a lot more damage with a Bridgeport mill used wrongly. Used rightly, though, you can achieve far more with a Bridgeport mill, far more quickly and easily, than any chisel in the history of the world could ever let you do.
Don’t mistake the explosion of JavaScript land for being the same thing as the World Wide Web. Static websites are as easy to build now as they were in 1995, and in some ways easier.
Sorry, but I don't see how that is at all different than "you have to learn the Hypercard scripting language to do anything."
It would be utterly risible to suggest that a child of similar age and prior experience could do the same today, starting from scratch with web technologies. Yes, you can do more with the modern web. But the initial complexity barrier is very much higher.
That’s after work his way through much of the book, of course, but... as with any complex domain, the right teacher can make a big difference.
That's not to say it isn't a significant accomplishment, and he should be proud of it!
It’s pretty much all the major elements of web programming but using the more elegant ways of simplifying the experience.
I’m not denying the complexity just saying that there are still many (particularly in Python or in cloud PaaSes) who value streamlining the experience.
I get the sense the book tries to surf the reader over the top of most of that ocean, and that's reasonable enough, but the ocean is still there. I wouldn't consider it all that comparable to Hypercard, which in this metaphor I guess is more like the town pool back when those still existed? People who are ready for the deep end can dive into it, and people who feel like paddling around in the shallow end is more their speed can safely do that too.
But that's building on close to twenty years of working in the field, and a bit over three decades since I first put my hands on an Apple IIe's keyboard and wrote
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
I feel that enough people complain about it not existing and then quickly proceed to not recreating it. If there was market for this, it would exist.
I've never used Hyper Card, but I guess that for prototyping of 'real software', programs like InVision work. Most of the trivial programs you could create with HyperCard (from the examples shown) can be recreated in other software (like excel or soulver) or already exist.