Developer / NetCloak

NetCloak was the angle-bracket templating system GuruHits pages ran on under the classic Mac OS WebSTAR server. This page documents the language and provides a clean, MIT-licensed PHP re-implementation you can download and reuse.

The live GuruHits .html files were never plain HTML. They were NetCloak templates — a system of angle-bracket tags (<hide>, <show_variable …>, <macro …>, <exec_cgi …>) that the Mac web server processed on every request before sending the page. This page documents that language and the MIT-licensed PHP engine we wrote to faithfully run it again.

How NetCloak was served

• 2001 — WebSTAR. At launch, NetCloak ran as a plug-in to WebSTAR (the classic Mac OS web server), which also called the HyperCard quiz engine through an ACGI (<exec_cgi …>). GuruHits stayed on this WebSTAR + HyperCard combination for its whole life.
• Oct–Nov 2002 — Tenon iTools (the rest of the network). Around this time Joe moved his wider network of NetCloak sites off WebSTAR onto Tenon iTools — an Apache-httpd-based server on Mac OS X 10.2 — where NetCloak ran via Apple's redirect-acgi Apache handler (AddHandler redirect-acgi nclk fdml). GuruHits itself couldn't follow: nothing ran its HyperCard ACGI backend under Apache, so the quiz kept running on WebSTAR.
• Later (iTools 7) — FastCGI. On iTools, NetCloak then moved to Maxum's FastCGI module (mod_fastcgi.so), with the NetCloak runtime listening on localhost:9008. Adding .html to the handler list is exactly how NetCloak "cloaked" the .html pages it served.

The MIT engine

The re-implementation is a small, dependency-free library:

• Lexer — tokenizes a template into text + tags (longest-command-first matching, so show_variable wins over show).
• Interpreter::render($template, $context) — the mode engine: hide/show/flipmode set visibility; consecutive conditionals AND together (the latch that makes exactly one gated block show); plus all the insert_*/set_* handling.
• Context — the per-request state (locals, variables, cookies, globals, redirect).
• Two closures keep it game-independent: a macroLoader for <macro /x.macro> includes and an acgiDispatch for the <exec_cgi …> bridge.

Download & use

Download netcloak-php-1.0.0.zip

• Inside the zip: src/ (the four classes) + tests + a runnable example + composer.json + MIT LICENSE.
• Machine-readable tag reference: tags.json.

use NetCloak\{Interpreter, Lexer, Context, Rng};

$interp = new Interpreter(new Lexer(), new Rng(),
    fn($relPath) => file_get_contents("macros/$relPath"),  // <macro /x> includes
    fn($cmd, $ctx) => '');                                  // <exec_cgi …> hook

echo $interp->render('Hi <INSERT_VARIABLE name>!', new Context(variables: ['name' => 'Joe']));

Tag reference

Conversion cookbook (NetCloak → PHP)

Conditional blocks. A NetCloak gated block becomes a render of the same template against a Context:

<hide><show_local rank = "Guru">You made Guru!<hide>

$ctx = new Context();
$ctx->setLocal('rank', $rank);
echo $interp->render($tpl, $ctx);
// chained conditionals AND together, so with several gated lines exactly one shows

Server-side includes. <macro /header.macro> is resolved by your macroLoader closure — point it at wherever your .macro fragments live; the engine processes the included text too.

The CGI bridge. <exec_cgi hypercard.acgi quizresult> becomes a call into your acgiDispatch closure: receive the command string (quizresult) + the Context, and return whatever HTML your back-end produces. In GuruHits's reconstruction this dispatches to the ported HyperTalk quiz logic.