zlacker

Anyone who can click a mouse could make a HyperCard stack. You could draw like in MacPaint, and create connections between cards almost as easily. You could create template pages, and save data in the stack itself. You could send it to your friend, or back it up, simply by copying one file.

These days Apple is promoting "progressive disclosure" as a feature of Swift. HyperCard was an excellent example of that!

The web isn't. Doing these with the web requires at least a server, a programming language, and a database. Anyone can easily view a webpage, but you need a separate editing system to be able to easily create. Even then, there's probably no "View Source" for most of it. Without a big fancy editing system, there's a huge learning curve between "hello world in HTML" to sharing with your friend, creating a template shared between pages, or saving data between sessions.

Of course, that's modern web architecture. The "original web architecture" had no XHR, or even JS. It was 5 years before you could click somewhere on the screen and have it do anything other than "go to another HTML page".

>>ken+(OP)
Well, I still think that allowing Javascript onto the web was a fatal mistake. HTTP/URL/HTML and eventually also CSS was a fantastic combination. This stack was progressively learnable via self-discovery.

Once the Javascript-coders infected the web it almost immediately turned into a write-only medium.

I worked at a browser vendor whilst all of this was happening. I was busy with the mechanics of building a particular browser. Couldn't make sense of the javascript/webstandards stuff in detail, but I trusted these people were smart enough. I did notice the people who were running this stuff (they were making the formerly kinda static html/css web standards dynamic by defining vast amounts of javascript API:s) were all very young people. Probably a median age of 21 or so. (Some "wunderkids" around 17 or so.) The average age of the people actually implementing stuff was closer to 28-30 in this company. Nothing against young people in general.. they can bring new thoughts etc.. but.. they do tend to lack experience.

In retrospect I regret that I didn't engage with this young crowd more. In general I wish there had been more discussion between these two camps.