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So, What Does "HREF" Stand For, Anyway?
- shib71 16y agoI took one look at that huge text and smiled. Readability without the extra click to run the bookmarklet. Thank you.
- palish 16y agoMan. The web was barely used in 1991, which seems very not-that-long-ago. I was born in 1988, so it's strange to me to imagine life without the web. I eventually want to be in an environment where I'm surrounded by the grandmasters of those older eras, to learn the lessons they learned; lessons that can only be taught after decades (plural) of engineering experience.
- qq66 16y agoThe true whitebeards make most programmers like us look like middle school Lego programmers.
- hawflakes 16y agoOr elementary school turtle programmers. Anyone else that relates to that reference is also officially old.
- hugs 16y agoside-note: very few people know turtle is built-in to Python >>> import turtle
- jacquesm 16y agoThank you, I really needed that. :(
- dmd 16y agoMy elementary school teacher was very confused by my LOGO programs - they produced no graphic output. I mostly wrote bizarre choose-your-own-adventure IF. It was pretty bad. (b. 1978; I'm in the net.legends file, to my eternal shame)
- mkramlich 16y agoso are you a 32-year old C/Lisp wizard now? ;)
- technoweenie 16y agoOMG Turtles! I seem to recall the cursor actually being a turtle. I'd re-skin them as buildings and spaceships, and crash them into each other with scripted animation commands. Is that the same thing?
- GFischer 16y agoHeh, it was still taught until a few years ago here (Uruguay). I remember it from 1990, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's still taught in some schools.
- kls 16y agoI would not exactly call us whitebeards, I was 17 when the web was invented and was already on the net. I am 35 now, not exactly over the hill, I may be an old dude to some of you young guys, but to me the whitebeards are the COBOL guys form the 60-70s. On another note, an interesting bit of trivia is that the web was invented on a NeXT box and the first group of developers to jump on to web development (me included) generally opted for NeXT boxes as their development platform of choice. If you where to have looked at that snap shot in time, you would have though NeXT was going to rule the web development world. I think it is a strange twist of fate that it did not and now some how through a twisted chain of events, NeXT (OSX) is again a lot of web developers system of choice.
- Luyt 16y agoIn those days, you'd use FTP a lot. And Archie, a search engine for FTP sites. IRC and usenet also existed as popular ways of online communication before the web, and email of course ;-). Somewhat later Gopher servers came into being, and you could use Veronica to search gopherspace.
- Keyframe 16y agoNot to mention MUDs.
- chrisduesing 16y agoWhich, perhaps surprisingly, are still alive and well to this day: http://www.mudconnect.com/ http://www.mudconnect.com/ Incidentally I was an advertising major until I found MUDs in 93 and practically failed out of the program. I switched to CS so I could learn to make my own, and here we are 17 years later...
- kls 16y agoThere was also WAIS, which was interesting in it own respect. you would open "databases" across the net and search for info that you where interested in. A lot of counterculture stuff was available as well as a lot of good programming documents. The process got pretty cumbersome after the net expanded past the universities and government establishments. It did not scale well. To the GP poster. I can remember a time before the net (it seems like yesterday) and back then we had local BBS services that some tech guy, in the local community, usually ran. There where also some regional and national BBS networks. They would advertise them in the back of DR. Dobb's and some of the other computer hobbyist magazines. In some ways, that was a cooler time to be into computing, everything was new, everything was exclusive because it took some technical know how to get onto these networks. Small things where groundbreaking developments back then. Computers where slow so you had to be resourceful and creative when developing. Don't get me wrong, I love where we have come, but back then there was a sense of being part of a revolution, it may just have been because, I was a little younger than you are now, but it seemed so much more fascinating back then.
- neilk 16y agoEventually? Dude. Look around you, virtually speaking.
- technoweenie 16y agoAnd the most upvoted message from them: lmgtfy.
- cookiecaper 16y agoIt's always meant "hyperreference" to me.
- madair 16y agoPeople working on the web for 10 years don't know what HREF stands for? I take back all the good things I've said about 'em youngsters ;D
- dasil003 16y agoI knew what it stands for, so you can still say good things about me.
- sprout 16y agoYou have to understand, we've lived and worked on the web our entire adult lives. We don't necessarily know what href stands for any more than we know what 'goodbye' is a contraction of. But we know what it means.
- BrandonM 16y agoUpvoted because I'd never even thought about the word goodbye ("Of course, it means 'may this bye be good'!"). Fortunately wiktionary had the answer: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/goodbye http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/goodbye Pretty interesting. (And obviously, bye is just a shortened form of goodbye.)
- madair 16y agoYeah I was just playing
- flatulent1 16y agoMost of these youngsters probably haven't heard of Hypercard either. Links before HTML... (but they were local) Too bad there's no Hypercard app for the iPad. That could be fun if done right.
- nailer 16y agoAnyone else already know 'hypertext reference'? Like that's what they read when they made first made web pages in the 90s, and they've never heard any different, or realized this was a mystery?
- andrewingram 16y agoYup, I was slightly surprised that it's not more widely known.
- Ixiaus 16y agoIt always seemed logical to me; I never heard anyone actually "say" it (or write it) but it seemed logical that "ref" stood for "reference" and "h" stood for hypertext - since links point to URI's and back then the only linkable resources were hypertext documents instead of server side scripts/CGI.
- noverloop 16y agoAn entire blogpost that can be summarized by google 'define:href'
- mkramlich 16y agoand our collective response could be summarized as RTFM. :)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- AndyKelley 16y agoIt always meant "retaining backwards compatibility at the cost of deprecated names" to me.
- neilk 16y agoAt least HREF makes sense. "Anchor"...?
- nailer 16y agoIt attaches you to part of a page. Like an anchor moors your boar to part the pier.
- davebert 16y agoI'm never going sailing with you, if that's what you use an anchor for! An anchor holds you (sort of, if you're lucky) to the seabed.
- jacquesm 16y agoIn coastal waters. Otherwise when you want to slow your boat relative to the wind you use a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_anchor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_anchor , the most common use of which is in heavy weather.
- nailer 16y agoHehe. You're right of course. I guess I think if it as a way of stopping the boat.
- ethan 16y agoNo it doesn't, it redirects you to another page or part of a page. Never made sense to me either.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoIt's because link is too long ... oh wait ...
- keyle 16y agoSo after 10 or so years of html experience, the guy can't google for "href wikipedia"?
- mkramlich 16y agoI don't like this new trend of people making blog posts and comments about questions that can be answered in 30 seconds with a Google search.
- vdm 16y agoThe author describes his efforts to find the information in existing sources, e.g. the HTML spec and DTD. He didn't manage to, and experts who were party to the original discussions pitched in with comments. You should link to the search that provides the same results. You can even use lmgtfy.com if you're feeling bitchy. I'd say Ryan Tomayko knows how to use Google; did you do any background on him? By your logic, Wikipedia should just link to searches too; but then it wouldn't be Wikipedia.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agohttp://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Ahref http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Ahref 4th one down "hypertext reference ..." unless I guessed wrong?
- gintas 16y agoYou did guess wrong - it seems to be 'head reference' actually. As the article explains, the original links were conceptualized with two anchors, the 'head' and the 'tail', and 'href' is the reference to the head of the link.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoDon't tell me I'm going to have to RTFA?
- pasbesoin 16y agoIIRC, with respect to hypertext as a concept rather than specific HTML specs/implementations, hyperlinks were sometimes envisioned (implemented?) as being bi-directional references. As such, you needed an element on each end of the reference that pointed to the other end. In thinking of "href" as "head reference", you are providing a URI (possibly also a target URL) from your source document -- the tail -- to the intended destination, the head. I'm unclear what this looks like from the head's perspective. Is the tail/head distinction absolute, or relative and dependent upon the current document's perspective? If absolute, then the tail might be viewed as the link's instantiator.
- pornel 16y agoLink to original WWW source is interesting: http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/HyperText.m http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/Hyper...
- lunaru 16y agoI'm not sure what makes me sadder: the fact that people don't just automatically know this, or the fact that I'm so old that I do. It's probably the latter. Everyday it seems something that I've just always known enters the realm of obscure and arcane. Soon I'll be having a hard time keeping up with the new. Oh well.
- teilo 16y agoI know exactly how you feel. My reaction was, "Isn't that obvious?" I remember when the term hypertext was all the rage, and when it was by no means certain that the Internet was the fabled "information superhighway" where all the data in the world would be cross-linked. I was born in '73, so I imagine I am right on the cusp of those who would have had personal knowledge of this, and those who would be too young to have cared at the time.
- lucianapostol 16y agoThis proves how often we think that things that we use often means. Since we are get used to it we don't think anymore at it's meaning
- Amnon 16y agoInteresting. The glossary at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_2.html#GLOSS19 http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_2.html#GLOSS19 defines hyperlink as "a relationship between two anchors, called the head and the tail. The link goes from the tail to the head. The head and tail are also known as destination and source, respectively." So what we have is "Anchor Head REFerence" when we should simply have "Link DESTination". Think about it when you next design a world changing markup language.
- teilo 16y ago"10 years" working with HTML? No wonder he didn't know. My first web browser was Mosaic, running via Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.11 on a 14.4k modem. (This was in '94, I think). Back then, we all knew what hypertext was, because the term was in common use, and the default background for web pages was a lovely #C0C0C0. It's totally a generation gap thing. Just a few years difference and so much is taken for granted. My joints feel sore just thinking about it. I'm going to listen to some ABBA, now...
- seldo 16y agoCompletely agree. But I'm sure we have our equivalents -- I was writing a blog post about SQL the other day and realized I couldn't remember if it stood for Standard Query Language or Structured Query Language (it's the latter, but doesn't it feel like the former makes more sense?).
- asjo 16y agoThere isn't much standard about (implemented) SQL: http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/ http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/ - so... ;-)
- seldo 16y agoWell it sure as hell isn't structured... I mean, crap is just tacked onto the end of statements any old how :-)
- JadeNB 16y agoI discovered, much to my surprise, that Andy Beaulieu (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/789 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/789) insists (without any justification that I can see) that it is neither: http://books.google.com/books?id=1PgCCVryjOQC&lpg=PP1&ots=X3TXJ9zVtO&dq=%22Learning%20SQL%22&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=1PgCCVryjOQC&lpg=PP1....
- bosch 16y agoHaha Trumpet Winsock, that was so hard to get installed sometimes. I remember when you had to edit the startup files to get it working correctly and it was a bitch because you couldn't get much help as you couldn't get on the Internet forums...
- flatulent1 16y agoWe should have told him HREF was a Macintosh type, creator or resource identifier code.... Those were 4 characters in length and there very well could be one by that name, and quite possibly much older than HTML. I searched for a list of the codes, but found a database that needs a password. "Shareware" like that should be called keyware. I remember when shareware was a voluntary contribution for something that worked... not this locked keyware demoware stuff.... /endrant
- flatulent1 16y agoLooking around more, it looks like HREF really is/was a Macintosh resource type... but it is still a URL. Basically it's a text track in a Quicktime movie that contains a URL. To make this interesting enough for you guys to read, here it is described in terms of being used as a Quicktime-based exploit! http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/backdooring-quicktime-movies/ http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/backdooring-quicktime-movies/
- mkramlich 16y agoI think learning what HTTP, HTML and HREF stood for were one of the first things I learned back in the mid/late 90's when getting into web programming. Since H stood for hypertext in both HTTP and HTML I think a reasonable person would guess it also stood for that in HREF.
- mkramlich 16y agoNext you kids will be asking where the word "car" came from (vehicular not Lisp), and whether Paul McCartney was ever part of a band.