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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

The Web was significantly influenced by HyperCard. Tim Berners-Lee's original prototypes envisioned it as bidirectional, with a hypertext editor shipping alongside the browser. In that sense it does live on, and serves as the basis for much of the modern Internet.

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IIRC, the mouse pointer turning into a hand when you mouse over something clickable was original to HyperCard. And I think Brendan Eich was under a heavy influence of HyperTalk when created JavaScript.

Wasn't the pointer always a hand in HyperCard?

Depended on context, and what the stack programmer set it to. Possibilities (per Fig. 51-1 in _The Complete Hypercard Handbook, 2nd edition_ were:

- watch

- busy

- hand

- arrow

- iBeam

- cross

- plus

And in turn, from the css2 spec:

https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-CSS2-971104/ui.html

JavaScript felt like it took the best parts of C (concise expressiveness) and the ease of use of HyperTalk (event handlers, easy hierarchical access to objects, etc). It was pretty sweet.

I honestly don't think the modern web is a legitimate hypertext system at this point. It was already bad enough 20 years ago with flash and serverside CGI but now most of the major websites are just serving JavaScript programs that then fetch data using a dedicated API. And then there's all the paywalls and constant CAPTCHA checks to make sure you aren't training an LLM off their content without a license.

Look up hyperland, it's a early 90s documentary by Douglas Adams and the guy from doctor who about the then-future hypermedia revolution. I can remember the web resembling that a long time ago but the modern web is very far removed from anything remotely resembling hypertext.

This is discussed a bit in the book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/192405005-hypermedia-sys...

which maybe argues for a return to early ideas of the web as a successor to Hypercard...

That look like my kind of book, I'll definitely be checking it out. Overall I'm still pretty pessimistic about hypertext making a true return, there's too much money in the web as an app-delivery mechanism, plus we have an entire generation of adults who are younger than Facebook, and now companies are trying to gatekeep the content itself because they want to be able to charge for LLM training on their text (I've noticed a significant increase in how many CAPTCHA challenges I get and I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with DDOS).

But I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who misses the old web when it really was all about exchanging ideas and information over open protocols. I will never get over this massive sense of nostalgia whenever I remember browsing through weird groceries fan sites and seeing people just documenting their love for whatever hobbies they had and the platforms weren't always pushing political BS to "drive engagement" by making me angry.

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