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Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

The thing that hypercard completely missed was the hyperlink.

The second thing was that hypercard was a program html was a format.

Another case of worse is better? shrug.

You all probably know this… Contemporary computing behavior is for the cursor to change to a little hand as it rolls over a link or button. This was first introduced by HyperCard, so it is there as an everyday reminder of its legacy.

On the same note, I often wonder why the mouse cursor on so many OSes is identical to the one used on the Macintosh[0]. Did they really all just copy what was in the Macintosh System Software, or was there an earlier pioneer of the typical black arrow with a white outline?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Mac_OS#/media/File:App...

First image in this blog post shows the cursor as it was first(?) seen on an Alto. So, so much of our computing paradigms came from Xerox PARC.

http://www.righto.com/2017/10/the-xerox-alto-smalltalk-and-r...

Ah yeah but the "tail" on that arrow is much longer! The one I see in Linux and BSDs appears to be literally pixel-for-pixel identical to the Macintosh one, though I haven't exactly done a closeup comparison.

> Ah yeah but the "tail" on that arrow is much longer! The one I see in Linux and BSDs appears to be literally pixel-for-pixel identical to the Macintosh one, though I haven't exactly done a closeup comparison.

They are quite similar, but there's more pixel differences between current Linux/BSD pointers and the Macintosh pointer than there are between the Macintosh pointer than the Alto one (roughly 1 pixel difference).

IOW, Macintosh is closer to the Alto one than it is to the Linux/BSD ones.

To some degree there is only one solution to this problem of arrow cursor design. Vertices, horizontals and 45 degree diagonals render effectively, even on low resolution screens. The arrow head of a mouse cursor consists of: 1 vertical, 1 horizontal, 1 leftward 45 degree diagonal and 1 rightward 45 degree diagonal.

HyperCard absolutely had hyperlinks, and later versions had them in recognizable form before the web did — you could link from an arbitrary range of text in a text field.

You could link to content _in another Stack_ (file) , for that matter. HyperCard absolutely had hyperlinks :) They were just called Buttons, but you could not only directly link to something, but also attach scripting to do additional stuff, pretty much exactly like the <a> tag we use and attach click events to today. I mean, I guess it wasn't like a piece of inline text, but you would just overlay a transparent button. That's a method I used, but there were probably better ways to link text. It was a long time ago, tough to even remember haha

But you could not link to content on another machine. I think that was the thing that made HyperCard obsolete the day HTML arrived.

the way I remember it, hypercard was hosted locally, as in, you'd get it on a floppy and then copy it to your computer. so linking to another computer didn't really make sense in that pre-Internet era

> the day HTML arrived.

I don't know where you lived but where I did internet adoption was slow, and most computers operated in isolation for years before everyone was connected. Floppy disks and CD-ROM reigned supreme for quite a while. Long enough for a new version of HyperCard to have come out with hyperlink support if that had been a priority.

Hypercard was the more polished and superior product. However html did several things better than hypercard.

An open and simple file specification. I don't know much about hypercard, was it's file format published?

An open and simple network transport system. html pages could trivially be loaded and linked from anywhere on the network.

The client came with source code and permission to modify it. Very quickly there were several competing implementations. for every operating system.

Yes, good points, but this just shows it wasn't only one thing that made HTML win over hypercard. It did multiple things right, and also was in the right place and the right time to get started. CERN actually had a network that was also used by scientists to exchange documents. Hyperlinks to documents on other computers made sense there. Conquering the desktop in general took a little longer.

The thing html missed out on (which was part of the original vision, to be fair) was using the same program for editing and viewing.

And bi-directional links by way of Ted Nelson

Bi-directional links are a non-starter from the perspective of having an autonomous distributed system.

Think about it this way, would you be happy if any random scammer could place links into your web page, well, with bidirectional links, now they can.

Certainly, I wouldn't want spammers to be able to insert links into my text. However, if there was an option in my browser to see who had linked to the content, sorted by some reasonable measure, such as page-rank, don't you think that would be a good thing for the web?

The HTML way for that is HTTP Referer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer#:~:text=In%20HTTP...

Your server would need to log and report on those entries. Of course, for privacy and other reasons, this is probably not dependable any more.

Netscape had it for a long time.

My recollection is the original graphical browsers were all editors. I’m pretty sure for example ViolaWWW was an editor, and directly referenced HyperCard too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW

But the Hyper in HyperCard literally means hyperlink.

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