Show HN: WildCard.html, a working retro HyperCard/HyperTalk simulator

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”

Long ago, I cut my programming teeth on HyperCard until I was ready to jump to C. Later I started to learn web programming, which was rumored to be based on many of the ideas, and I was struck by how similar and yet how different to HyperCard it really was. The event model, for example, just needed a mouseUp handler, to make buttons work -- but you had to write in JavaScript??

WildCard.html was built in about a month of spare hours, and runs great on WebKit, Mozilla, and I even touched up some of the UI to run on iPad. Sure, HyperCard isn't suitable for much modern work anymore. Nothing from that era is, directly. But I would like to go back to those days when WYSIWYG (What you Saw is What you Got.)

Couldn't modern web programming use a shot of simplicity? The UI is almost obvious; the HyperTalk "Reference" is in BNF format; the tutorial is three cards long; and you can edit everything you want. All of it fit in about 100K of vanilla HTML5 that runs in any green browser, just like it did in 1987. Try it, have fun, and dream of the future!