Today it occurred to me that, after a little over ten years of basic fluency in HTML, I have absolutely no idea why the href attribute is named “href”. Why not “url”, “link”, or even just “ref”?
Tim Bray evaluates the web’s basic design from the perspective of the Fallacies of Distributed Computing. Reminds me of TimBL’s Axioms of Web architecture a bit. This stuff is essential to understanding why the web succeeded where other systems failed and why the web seems quirky in some ways compared to other distributed computing systems.
From the comments: “HyperText is like Text, but includes links to and from other hypertexts.”