
So, What Does "HREF" Stand For, Anyway? - iamelgringo
http://tomayko.com/writings/wtf-is-an-href-anyway
======
teilo
"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
Completely 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
There isn't much standard about (implemented) SQL:
<http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/> \- so... ;-)

~~~
seldo
Well it sure as hell isn't _structured_... I mean, crap is just tacked onto
the end of statements any old how :-)

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palish
Man. 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.

~~~
Luyt
In 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
Not to mention MUDs.

~~~
chrisduesing
Which, perhaps surprisingly, are still alive and well to this day:

<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...

------
nailer
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?

~~~
andrewingram
Yup, I was slightly surprised that it's not more widely known.

------
shib71
I took one look at that huge text and smiled. Readability without the extra
click to run the bookmarklet. Thank you.

~~~
joshu
I really like his design sense.

~~~
alnayyir
This has inspired me to use larger fonts when I rebuild/redesign my personal
site.

------
madair
People 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

~~~
sprout
You 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
Upvoted 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>

Pretty interesting. (And obviously, _bye_ is just a shortened form of
_goodbye_.)

------
pornel
Link to original WWW source is interesting:

[http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-
NeXT/Implementation/Hyper...](http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-
NeXT/Implementation/HyperText.m)

------
lunaru
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.

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
I 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.

------
Amnon
Interesting. The glossary at <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.

------
AndyKelley
It always meant "retaining backwards compatibility at the cost of deprecated
names" to me.

------
flatulent1
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

~~~
flatulent1
Looking 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/>

------
keyle
So after 10 or so years of html experience, the guy can't google for "href
wikipedia"?

------
neilk
At least HREF makes sense. "Anchor"...?

~~~
nailer
It attaches you to part of a page. Like an anchor moors your boar to part the
pier.

~~~
davebert
I'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
In coastal waters.

Otherwise when you want to slow your boat relative to the wind you use a
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_anchor> , the most common use of which is in
heavy weather.

------
cookiecaper
It's always meant "hyperreference" to me.

------
mkramlich
I 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.

~~~
henning
How is that those questions get answered through Google searches? Because
people took the time to write posts that answer a specific question just like
this one.

~~~
poet
There's absolutely no way for your claim to be true unless the information is
only found on blog posts. Decently crafted Google queries easily return the
primary source (which is not a blog post).

[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aw3.org+href+...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aw3.org+href+%22hypertext+reference%22)

During the discovery process, just replace "hypertext reference" with whatever
you suspect HREF to stand for. The grandparent post is absolutely correct in
criticizing these types of blog posts.

~~~
rtomayko
Except none of that stuff was indexed by google at time of writing. The links
that were added to Wikipedia after the article was published made your search
possible:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hyperlink#what_does_href_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hyperlink#what_does_href_stand_for.3F)

Trust me. The whole reason the article exists was because there was no clear
answer through search/wikipedia/w3c/etc.

~~~
poet
You're right. I did not realize your blog post was from 2008 (I falsely
assumed it was a recent post). I based my assertions off of the fact that
Google has a cache of the page in question dating back to July 1st 2010:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a6pIrYo...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a6pIrYoNrG4J:www.w3.org/Provider/ServerWriter.html+%22www.w3.org/Provider/ServerWriter.html%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us).
Unfortunately, it is too late to edit my original comment to remove my
inaccuracies. Thanks for digging this information up. :)

------
noverloop
An entire blogpost that can be summarized by google 'define:href'

~~~
mkramlich
and our collective response could be summarized as RTFM. :)

------
mkramlich
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.

------
mkramlich
Next you kids will be asking where the word "car" came from (vehicular not
Lisp), and whether Paul McCartney was ever part of a band.

