On 9/5/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/5/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
FT2 wrote:
- 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.
That seems reasonable to me---that's usually what people mean by the inline links anyway (an assertion that their link constitutes a reference). Of course someone should still come along and either: 1) expand them into a full citation (e.g. with {{cite web}}); or 2) determine that the link is not a reliable source, and either remove it or move it to the "external links" section. But we have to do that with links that are already in ref tags anyway.
That will mangle attempts to do standard administrative history and link references in the context of an inline discussion on a talk or notice page, though...
How about only converting links which lack label text, then? "[http://url/]" would get turned into an inline reference of the form "<ref>http://url</ref>", while a "labeled" link of the form "[http://url/ link text]" would still generate an inline link. There are some articles where an inline link is actually desired (a link to a web site in an article about the site, for example, or pretty much anything outside article space) - but they should be labeling their links anyways.
What'd be even nicer would be falling back to the original link behavior (or some variant thereof) if there's no <references/> tag present in the page. I don't have a strong understanding of the parser, so I don't know if this would be possible to implement cleanly. It seems like the nicest possible solution, though - as talk and project pages lack <references/> tags, they fall back to numbered links, which is desirable.