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Top-level
 There's a distressing trend in computing where the computer tries to prevent you from having to know anything, and in doing so creates a LOT more work for you. I first noticed it when I was working with a content management system called Joomla about ten years ago. A content management system or CMS is a kinda framework of scripts to (theoretically) make running a website easier. Instead of making a bunch of pages like about.html, faq.html, contact.html, tablesaws.html, you'd write your... 5 comments
but it does, kind of, make some things easier for the writer (at the expense of making other things much much complicated). Anyway there I was, fiddling about with joomla, and I wanted to make a sidebar of links so people could navigate around the sections of the site. So here's how you make a link in HTML: <a href="https://www.improbableisland.com">Click here to play Improbable Island, my text game</a> So the "a" there is shorthand for "anchor," which I guess is what links were called for the five minutes between having the idea and deciding the spec and someone coming up with a better name. The "href" bit is where the link goes. The bit in between > and </ is the link text, and </a> means you're done talking about a link.  @ifixcoinops specifically re: "anchor", the "link" was originally the connection between two anchors, which is why you can link to a named anchor by putting the name in the fragment part (after the octothorpe/hashtag) of a URL  @bonzoesc @ifixcoinops yes! specifically, an "anchor" in real life is a thing that a chain link hooks on to on either side. So in graph terms the "anchor" is the node (which is what you are defining with <a>) and the link itself is the relationship or edge between the nodes. Of course it makes more sense when links are bidirectional... |
Gregory's Server
...articles into an article-writing page on your website, click the save button, and the article would go into a database. Then instead of someone going to mynewtablesaw.html they'd go to article.php?articlename=mynewtablesaw and the site would retrieve the article from the database, generate all the stuff around it like navigation links, add comments and stuff - it's WAY slower than just mynewtablesaw.html, like at least one maybe two orders of magnitude slower