On 8/9/02 12:10 PM, "lcrocker@nupedia.com" lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:

...

I think parsing [http://www.someurl.com] as <a href="http://www.someurl.com">[1]</a> is very useful for documenting sources within articles, particularly quotes from web-accessible material. See the breastfeeding article, for example.

But you can still do that with [http://... (1)] (or [http://...%7C(1)] -- I plan to allow the use of "|" to be consistent with internal link syntax).

...

Would it be possible to have [http://www.someurl.com description] expanded in the printable version?

That's certainly doable, but I think I'll just make the conversion do this:

[http://...] ==> [http://...%7C(1)] http://... ==> [http://...]

And since the latter will print the URL, the functionality won't change much.

The difference is that the automatic numbering is lost. It's a serious difference, in that it pretty much ensures that people will stop using that notation.

If we don't think the numbered url references are useful, then it's fine that it's being lost.

But it's incorrect to believe that removing the automatic numbering won't eliminate the usage.