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
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.
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)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog
>Cyberdog was an OpenDoc-based Internet suite of applications, developed by Apple Computer for the Mac OS line of operating systems. It was introduced as a beta in February 1996 and abandoned in March 1997. The last version, Cyberdog 2.0, was released on April 28, 1997. It worked with later versions of System 7 as well as the Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 operating systems.
>Cyberdog derived its name from a cartoon in The New Yorker captioned "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-no-s...
>“Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs, WWDC ‘97. As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”.
As was Sun's original "HotJava" browser, implemented in Java of course, which was less formally component based than OpenDoc (since Java didn't have a comparable user interface component system like OpenDoc at the time, but it was at least very object oriented, modular, and extensible). HotJava served the purpose of opening a lot of people's eyes to the possibilities of Java and the web, but, like CyberDog, it was ahead of its time, and wasn't fully developed into a viable product, and served more as a technology demonstration and source of inspiration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava
>HotJava (later called HotJava Browser to distinguish it from HotJava Views) was a modular, extensible web browser from Sun Microsystems implemented in Java. It was the first browser to support Java applets, and was Sun's demonstration platform for the then-new technology. It has since been discontinued and is no longer supported. Furthermore, the Sun Download Center was taken down on July 31, 2011, and the download link on the official site points to a placeholder page saying so.
Unfortunately, neither CyberDog nor HotJava (nor Netscape, until JavaScript finally arrived on the scene) had scripting languages built in, which I believe is an essential ingredient to the success of web browsers and component systems (and text editors like Emacs, and user interface editors like HyperCard or HyperLook or Bongo, or content management systems and blogging tools like Frontier and Radio Userland, etc). Even something as terrible as Microsoft OLE, which evolved from Visual Basic VBXs, was successful because it was built around a scripting language (Visual Basic for VBX, but OLE opened it up to any language via COM/IDispatch/ActiveX/IScriptingEngine/etc).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783227
>In fact, one of the earliest tools that enabled anyone, even children, to author and publish their own interactive dynamic web applications with graphics, text, and even forms and persistent databases, was actually based on HyperCard and the MacHTTP/WebStar web server on the Mac:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226209
>One of the coolest early applications of server side scripting was integrating HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar, such that you could publish live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web! Since it was based on good old HyperCard, it was one of the first scriptable web authoring tools that normal people and even children could actually use!
MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton, and LiveCard HyperCard stack publisher:
CGI and AppleScript:
http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1...
>Cal discusses the Macintosh as an Internet platform, then describes how you can use the AppleScript language for writing CGI applications that run on Macintosh servers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865263
MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton! He was also VP of Engineering at Quarterdeck, another pioneering company.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110705053055/http://www.astron...
http://infomotions.com/musings/tricks/manuscript/0800-machtt...
http://tidbits.com/article/6292
>It had an AppleScript / OSA API that let you write handlers for responding to web hits in other languages that supported AppleScript.
I used it to integrate ScriptX with the web:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm...
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-develop...
The coolest thing somebody did with WebStar was to integrate it with HyperCard so you could actually publish live INTERACTIVE HyperCard stacks on the web, that you could see as images you could click on to follow links, and followed by html form elements corresponding to the text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, drop down menus, scrolling lists, etc in the HyperCard stack that you could use in the browser to interactive with live HyperCard pages!
That was the earliest easiest way that non-programmers and even kids could both not just create graphical web pages, but publish live interactive apps on the web!
Using HyperCard as a CGI application
http://aaa-proteins.uni-graz.at/HyperCGI.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20021013161709/http://pfhyper.co...
http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1...
https://web.archive.org/web/19990208235151/http://www.royals...
What was it actually ever used for? Saving kid's lives, for one thing:
>Livecard has exceeded all expectations and allows me to serve a stack 8 years in the making and previously confined to individual hospitals running Apples. A whole Childrens Hospital and University Department of Child Health should now swing in behind me and this product will become core curriculum for our medical course. Your product will save lives starting early 1997. Well done.
- Director, Emergency Medicine, Mater Childrens Hospital
Computer-Academia is a society which goes through cyclic periods of ignorance and dominance over industrial standard processes which produce viable exchange with the mass public, i.e. successful companies.
Between the 'cool new shit learned in school' and the 'top secret lab tech', there is a lot of re-invention, invention, refactoring, re-discovery, re-research.
Alas, the only good framework is the one in front of the user.
It took a screen snapshot of the HyperCard stack, and showed you an image of it in the web browser. And you could click on the image, which would map back to a simulated click on the stack, run whatever handlers and make whatever changes to the card or stack that HyperCard was programmed to do (draw something, switch to the next page, etc), and then it would download the next screen snapshot showing the change. Also it rendered any user interface widgets (text input fields, checkboxes, dropdown menus, etc) as html form fields below the image, that you could fill out in the browser and submit, whose values were then stuffed back into the actual HyperCard control fields. So you could use HyperCard stacks over the web that created, updated, and queried HyperCard databases, flipped between different cards and backgrounds, drew dynamic graphics, or did any arbitrarily programmed stuff like that.
He paid me $1500 to port it. That was my first paid software job. It led to an internship somewhere else and the rest is history.
Funny enough, while trying to find information about it, I found a Usenet post in Google Groups where the professor mentioned my name in 1993 about the stack. I never knew he posted about me before today.
What's the reference you've found on Usenet?
It’s referenced here:
http://mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.cdrom.com/pub/cdrom/cdrom...
search for “Professor X”. I first used a MacinTalk HyperCard plug in and later used a PlainTalk plug in.
That was actually my second version. My first version was written in AppleSoft Basic for the Apple //e and used Software Automated Mouth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth)
Here is the Usenet reference. The professor still works for the same University.
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!search/HyperCard$20gcedu...