[WikiEN-l] Why are URLs numbered?

[zetawoof]

On 9/5/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/5/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > FT2 wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > 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.