Tuesday, November 4, 2014 at 10:46 AM

Bringing back HyperCard

When people say we should bring back HyperCard now, I think we're actually quite close to it right now with the HTML and JavaScript. All you'd really have to do is:#

  1. Create a UI design toolkit that allows you to draw a user interface with divs that can have background-images that are bitmaps; and that's already a feature of HTML. #

  2. Create an object class accessible through scripts that mirrors the object structure of HyperCard. You just have to get out the manual and clone what they had. #

In other words, it's just a slight variant on the web. Definitely worth doing if there are people who would develop in this environment who find HTML-plus-JavaScript not easy enough to understand.#

I'm not in any way a good person to lead this, btw. I didn't spend much time with HyperCard, I was a C programmer at the time, and working directly with the Macintosh operating system, without an intermediate layer. I created a different environment, Frontier, that never got a graphic design tool (we tried) so when the web came along it was a perfect fit for us. In other words, I went in a slightly different direction in the early 90s.#

I think my friend Ted Howard tried to do this a while back??#


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By Dave Winer, Tuesday, November 4, 2014 at 10:46 AM. When in doubt, blog.