zlacker

>>jacque+(OP)
When young 13-year old me discovered hypercard, it gave me a feeling of awesomeness, and HyperTalk, the programming language of HyperCard, was a lot of fun.

I think that if hypercard had been the engine of the web instead of html/css, we would have had the current state of the web (ie. with client-side dynamic applications) a lot sooner.

Wether Hypertalk would have been a better choice than javascript to program the web, this is another story :)

For the curious, the Hypertalk entry in wikipedia contains a lot of code examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk

>>invali+r04
> we would have had the current state of the web (ie. with client-side dynamic applications) a lot sooner

But is this a good thing? After all, the web started and succeeded as a simple platform for passive document-browsing rooted in markup (SGML) technologies. There never was a need for a new general-purpose app platform (because that existed, and still exists, in the form of operating systems). Arguably, seeing the web as primarly an app delivery platform is what ruined the web even.

As to HyperTalk, it's an odd language for sure (did a HyperCard app for budget control in an agency around 1992), but listening to Bill Atkinson is still very inspiring.

>>tannha+854
As someone who had been building web stuff professionally since 1997 and got on it in 1994, I can say we were always trying to make it interactive back then because that's what people wanted.

There's a whole stream of forgotten technologies (server push images? Image maps? Html layers?) that show this.

Don't believe this rose tinted view of the old web. There was lots wrong with it and the current web stack is much, much better.

(Also SGML was never deployed as part of the web)

>>nl+Xc4
It doesn't seems like a rose-tinted view, with a background then in heavily-networked operating systems and hypermedia. Much of what was wrong was due to Mosaic and co.

The HTML standards were explicitly SGML applications, and the Amaya browser/editor had a fairly generic SGML engine. (As far as I know, Emacs W3 was the only browser even to implement everything in HTML 1, though.) Then, XML is an SGML application profile.

>>gnufx+Pm4
Everybody thought NCP's 8 bit host ids were enough, until TCP/IP happened. Then everybody thought OSI was going to take over and rule the world, until TCP/IP didn't stop happening. And then everybody though IPV6 would quickly take over, until IPV4 refused to die. And everybody thought the world was going to run on SGML, until HTML happened. And then everybody thought SGML might rise from the dead until XML happened. And then everybody thought XML would never just go away and die, until JSON happened. Just goes to show, you never know!