Hi,
I'm not sure if this has been discussed yet, but I want to raise it just in case it hasn't.
I like the proposal to make internal and external links use the same markup because it is more consistent, but I worry about the treatment of the ? character:
In the current syntax, it appears that the internal [[]] syntax encodes the ? character so that wiki pages can have the ? character in its name. While the external [] syntax does not encode the ? character so that pages that have the ? character in the URI still work (eg. cgi pages).
So in the new syntax, is the ? encoded or not? It would be nice if it were possible for the author to force the character to be encoded or not encoded.
I recently ran into a problem where I attempted to use interwiki links to shorten URIs (some of them can be hopelessly long) only to find that when I use the [[]] syntax, the ? becomes encoded and so the URI becomes mangled and unusable. Because of this behaviour I was unable to use the interwiki links the way I intended.
I wanted to use [[cvs:dir1/dir2/file?revision=1.3]] to link to
http://cvs.something.org/really-really-really-long/cgi-bin/dir1/dir2/file?re...
but instead got:
http://cvs.something.org/really-really-really-long/cgi-bin/dir1/dir2/file%3F...
Which the cgi application couldn't accept.
So the treatment of the ? character is important because it has a special meaning.
-John