by DonHopkins | 2025-10-05 23:25:22+00:00
Yes, HyperCard was eventually used over the internet, and it was the first way I know of that enabled people (kids even) to create and publish graphical web pages with a wysiwyg editor, including interactive forms and graphical buttons and links.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134403

DonHopkins on Dec 26, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

Speaking about HyperCard, creating web pages, and publishing live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web, I wrote this about LiveCard:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283045

DonHopkins on Feb 9, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)

Check out this mind-blowing thing called "LiveCard" that somebody made by combining HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar (a Mac web server by Chuck Shotton that supported integration with other apps via Apple Events)! It was like implementing interactive graphical CGI scripts with HyperCard, without even programming (but also allowing you to script them in HyperTalk, and publish live HyperCard databases and graphics)!

Normal HyperCard stacks would even work without modification. It was far ahead of its time, and inspired me to integrate WebStar with ScriptX to generate static and dynamic HTML web sites and services!

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

https://web.archive.org/web/20060205023024/http://aaa-protei...

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

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Also (a historical note about web browsers with editors, not about HyperCard):

NetScape Gold had a built-in WYSIWYG HTML editor window. But it was a unique selling point -- earlier and other versions of browsers didn't support that. Now browsers have official APIs to support WYSIWYG HTML editing via the "contenteditable" attribute, execCommand function, and Selection class, but you have to implement the menus and toolbars of the user interface yourself, and there are a lot of libraries for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Navigator_(v...

>Netscape also released a Gold version of Navigator 3.0 that incorporated WYSIWYG editing with drag and drop between web editor and email components.[49]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer

https://www.ou.edu/class/webstudy/n4/old/N_GOLD_Editor_Windo...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/interaction.html#attr...

https://w3c.github.io/editing/docs/execCommand/#execcommand%...

https://w3c.github.io/selection-api/#selection-interface