"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.<p>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...
Man. The web was barely used in 1991, which seems very not-that-long-ago.<p>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 <i>decades</i> (plural) of engineering experience.
Anyone 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?
Link to original WWW source is interesting:<p><a href="http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/HyperText.m" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/Hyper...</a>
I'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.<p>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.
Interesting. The glossary at <a href="http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_2.html#GLOSS19" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_2.html#GLOSS19</a> defines hyperlink as<p>"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."<p>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.
We 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
I 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.