Wednesday, January 14, 2015
===========================

On making a web page remind me of a quality I never fully appreciated in
HyperCard.

So I generally am totally ok with scrolling on web pages.  I think in
fact it's a major advantage of the form.

Then again, I just got to indulging a few minutes of thinking about
HyperCard, and I think that this time rather than read the same old
articles about its ultimate doom over and over again, maybe I should do
something by way of recreating part of it that was different from the
web in general.

The web has plenty of stupid carousels and stuff, but despite their example I'm
curious whether HyperCard's stack model could still hold up as an idea.  I was
never sure whether it was the important thing or not.  It was so obviously and
almost clumsily a _metaphor_.  (A skeuomorphism which I have never actually
seen anyone bag on when they are playing that game, perhaps because Designer
Ideologues know there's not much percentage in talking shit about HyperCard.)

Here is some JavaScript to start:

    $('article').each(function (i, a) {
      $(a).hide();
    });
    $('article').first().show();

I'll spare you the usual slow-composition narrative of where I go from here,
and jump straight to my eventual [first-pass solution](https://github.com/brennen/tildebrennen/commit/560826a9884dae47998843dcf4917266b3344fec).

(Ok, actually I just repurposed a terrible thing I did for some slides a while
back, after recreating about 75% without remembering that I had already written
the same code within the last couple of months.  It's amazing how often that
happens, or I guess it would be amazing if my short term memory weren't so
thoroughly scrambled from all the evil living I do.)