[WikiEN-l] Why are URLs numbered?

[Steve Bennett]

On 9/5/07, FT2 <ft2.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1 - give them numberings that fit in with footnote numberings, so that at
> least url / cite numbers are not duplicated.
>
> 2 - give them a different look, maybe [url-1] ... [url-2] ...
>
> 3. - auto-render all [http://link.com] as <ref>http://link.com</ref>. It's
> not perfect but the information's the best there is and its consistent in
> style.

What I would really like is a way of having proper refs but that are
as convenient as URLs. So for example this:

<ref>[http://foo.com Foo Times] 3 September 1968</ref>

could be rendered like:

[web-1]

where "web" is a link to http://foo.com, and 1 is a link to the
footnote containing the other text. It's really annoying that we
currently have to choose between a link format which is readily
explorable, and a referencing format that fits in with other
footnotes.

By default perhaps [http:/foo.com] could do something like the above,
but that would be a pretty major behaviour change that would break
stuff everywhere. For starters not every page has a <references>
section...

Steve