
What does "HREF" stand for? (2008) - sebkomianos
http://tomayko.com/writings/wtf-is-an-href-anyway
======
DanBC
So, I go to Google Groups to try to find the first mention of HREF on Usenet.

I have no idea how to do this. It takes four clicks just to get to the Google
Groups page.

I see a search box. I look for something to give me the advanced search page.
I can't find it. (I can see 2 buttons for settings.) So, I type HREF into the
search bar and click seach. The drop down offers "in any group" or "groups
named". First attempt I ignore both of those and just click the button.

Posts: 28200040, groups: 58

I need to narrow this down. I need the advanced search pane. It's still not
there.

I arrange by date. LOL NO, that hasn't worked for literally years.

The advance options turn up if I'm in a group. They allow me to narrow the
search down, but not to change the group I'm searching in.

I will donate $5 to the charity of your choice to the first person who tells
me how the fuck I can perform the following search:

[HREF]

any Usenet group (or the news hierarchy)

Before 1998

Sorted by date

Bonus $5 if the instructions you give are in any Google documentation online.

~~~
recuter
site:groups.google.com "href" daterange:2453006-2450815

Edit: sorry I bungled the conversion to the Julian format but you get the
idea. You could also click around the 'search tools' sub-menu to do that.

Edit 2: It won't let you sort by date but you can just limit it to before 1994
:)

It only finds one message from 1993 (Dec 6), on comp.os.linux.development:
[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.linux.development/Pk...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.linux.development/Pk3iKRsE5F0/RsBxmvSex7sJ)

~~~
DanBC
[http://imgur.com/a/FZYmz](http://imgur.com/a/FZYmz)

Who knows.

~~~
comex
The query is meant to be entered into Google web search.

~~~
DanBC
Wait. What. Really?

Oh my goodness.

Okay, so that sort of works. It's a bit of a kludge though.

~~~
arrrg
It’s not a kludge. It’s a way to search websites that happen to have awful
search (like Google Groups).

In most cases that works very well and it’s universally applicable. It’s a
consistent search interface for (pretty much) any website there is. You can
just throw Google at it and it works as good if not better than the websites’
own search (depending on how good that is), but it’s also a consistent
interface you do not have to discover and re-learn for every website
individually. Sometimes int

Kludge to me implies that it’s complicated to set up (it’s not; just “site:”
in front of the website plus your search terms) or that is either not
universally useable or at least requires a lot of manual adjustment every time
you want to use it elsewhere (it’s not; universal and consistent search that
works the same every time).

Sometimes a website’s own tools can be somewhat more comprehensive, sometimes
they are so bad that switching over to Google is a necessity to find anything
at all.

~~~
DanBC
You're right. But in the context of the largest and best search engine in the
world it's a bit kludgey to not be able to use their supplied search tools for
one of their own products, because they broke it so much, and to have to rely
upon a different product.

> consistent search that works the same every time

\+ vs "" ?

> sometimes they are so bad that switching over to Google is a necessity to
> find anything at all.

Yes, Google search is a useful tool for websites that have hopeless search.
I've used it for Wikipedia and other websites. It's baffling that Google's own
product has search so broken that using a different Google product to search
it is considered not-kludgey.

------
pit
"Hypertext reference," I said to myself as I clicked the link. What do I win?

~~~
djKianoosh
a downvote apparently :)

~~~
pit
It's nice to be noticed. :)

------
jmduke
I'm surprised to see that this submission is from 2008; while I identify with
the author's struggle (and subsequent delight) as he plays the part of an
Internet archaeologist, I thought this was a common piece of knowledge five
years ago, let alone today. Goes to show how incorrect assumptions about what
we do (and do not) know can be.

Burners-Lee's talks are wonderful. My favorite is his talk "Hypertext and Our
Collective Destiny":
[http://www.w3.org/Talks/9510_Bush/Talk.html](http://www.w3.org/Talks/9510_Bush/Talk.html)

~~~
aj700
Yeah, I just assume that today's 23-year-olds (or 13-year-olds) should all
know this, and had the same experience as me, using notepad.exe to alter/test
some html, which was grabbed from a "CD-ROM", that came with a "magazine",
with something like "Netscape 1.0" (for Win 3.1) on it, in late 1994! What's
The Frequency, Kenneth?

~~~
nationcrafting
Haha, I still edit some of my HTML in TextEdit or some simple txt editor... It
just opens so much quicker than Dreamweaver...

~~~
D9u
I taught myself beginning HTML/XHTML/PHP using Vieka Wordpad on a Samsung
SGH-i607. 3G was my only connection to the net at the time.

I never did use an IDE until lately, but Geany isn't much of an IDE compared
to some other choices.

------
jameshart
Let's see - the HREF attribute that implements the basic principle of
hypertext referencing in the Hypertext Markup Language which TBL invented as a
file format to serve over his Hypertext Transfer Protocol... what could it
possibly mean? I can see the confusion.

~~~
walid
The answer might sound logical to you but all this time I thought the
expansion was Hyperlink REFerence. My HTML education started in 1998 or 1999
from reading a PC Magazine series of articles on how to program in HTML. I
don't remember how I got the wrong info and frankly didn't bother to care
about this difference but I clicked this article with a smug face and reached
the bottom feeling childishly embarrassed.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
I just wonder how many people think that web is so wonderful invention. But
they completely forget Gopher. There isn't so much difference between web and
gopher after all. It's just a bit different linking method. After all, it's
rare that invetions are relly great, most of those are just small gradual
change over time. Still remember how much hype there was about hypertext back
in old days. See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29)

------
billforsternz
In the software world we often seem to end up with abbreviations which are
ubiquitous but no longer strongly linked to their unabbreviated form. I often
find this annoying and distracting. I try an avoid being the source of such
annoyance for others. For example if I find myself using abbreviations in my
source code, maybe as a prefix for example, I will always ensure the
abbreviation is explained at least once in a place that won't be lost (in a
header file for example).

An example from back in the day was the acronym (presumably) "Afx". Vast
numbers of identifiers in the old MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) Windows
API C++ wrapper used this prefix. For some reason not knowing what it meant
caused me chronic stress.

~~~
nfg
“One interesting quirk of MFC is the use of "Afx" as the prefix for many
functions, macros and the standard precompiled header name "stdafx.h". During
early development what became MFC was called "Application Framework
Extensions" and abbreviated "Afx". The name Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)
was adopted too late in the release cycle to change these references”
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Foundation_Class_Libr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Foundation_Class_Library)

~~~
billforsternz
Thanks. Actually this explanation reminds me that part of the frustration came
from the feeling that Mfc would have been a much more logical prefix and
wondering why oh why they hadn't used that instead.

------
doorhammer
I like this kind of article because what seems obvious isn't always correct.
It could have just as easily meant... anything... and seeing the process and
resources different people use to dig into things is always pretty neat.

~~~
wikwocket
In real life language etymology, people joke (with some degree of seriousness)
that if there is an explanation for a particular term or phrase, that is
logical, reasonable, and has some historical corroboration, it is almost
certainly wrong.

The evolution of language is a strange and unexpected process. I think this
clearly applies to programming languages too. Surely more so for some
languages than for others... but this seems to definitely be the case for web
languages, since the ecosystem they evolve in is so chaotic.

~~~
doorhammer
It's funny. I half jokingly apply that maxim to a lot business decisions I
see.

Someone will say "oh it makes sense that apartment a does this, because x y z"
and I respond with "they may be doing something right, but theyre almost
certainly not doing it hat way _because_ it's right"

But yeah. It pays not assume the obvious answer is the right one

------
Pxtl
I'm surprised they didn't fix this sillyness in HTML5 when they were making up
semantically-sensible tags for everything else.

A tag with

    
    
        <link to="http://somepage" in="new window">
    

or something like that would make more sense as having the "article" inside
the "body" of the document. Yes, I know link is already used in the head. You
know what I mean, though.

I mean, the dual-use of a as both anchor and link has always been bizarre.

~~~
gilgoomesh
> I mean, the dual-use of a as both anchor and link has always been bizarre.

In the original Ted Nelson "Xanadu" conception of hypertext (which inspired
Berners-Lee and others at the time), all links were bi-directional.

We now use <a name=""> as a target and <a href=""> as a source but the
original idea was that every link would be both a target _and_ source – you'd
link from one page to another then travel through the bi-directional link
_backwards_ and resume the original page.

Yeah, it didn't happen because it was grossly impractical didn't serve any
real-world purpose. But that's why they share the same tag.

------
ghenne
The term Hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson, probably 1965. Check out his book
Computer Lib/Dream Machines. He envisioneers the internet quite well.

~~~
epo
Coined '63, published '65 according to wikipedia
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson)

I'm old enough to have read Computer Lib ('74) when it came out, I have a
first edition which I imported into the UK by sending some sort of
international money order to a US bookshop. For some reason I also have a
second edition.

------
m3andros
According to Wikipedia the "href" attribute stands for: "Hypertext REFerence"
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink))

------
sleepyK
Even my high school computer science text book taught me HREF= Hypertext
REFerence...

Though I didn't know the A stands for Anchor, so there's that.

------
based2
Open proposals - No patents attached:

href => @,to,dest,target (others: [http://json-ld.org/](http://json-ld.org/))

\-------------

/etc => /config

/etc/rc.d => /config/start.d

[beyond POSIX]

------
dsego
I don't get it. Is this a joke?

------
sai1511
href stands for HiddenReflex

------
nfailor
yeah upvotes must just be for humiliation's sake.

