On 11/27/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
[[http://foo.com]] almost certainly is intended to be rendered as <a href="http://foo.com">[1]</a>, I agree. However, [[http://foo.com foo]] may well be wanted as [<a href="http://foo.com">foo</a>] (ie. [foo] with only the inside linked). Would your plan only be for external links with default link text, or would it be for all external links? If the latter, I think it's a bad idea.
Insofar as it's a plan and not just idle speculating, you mean...
Yes, I think in the second case it becomes ambiguous, so probably best to treat the brackets as intentional.
However there is one third situation:
[[http://foo.com%7CFoo is great]] - how do you treat this?
I don't really like the distinct internal/external link syntax. It's not possible to internally link to an article that has a name that could be a URL, so there is no possibility of ambiguity. Hence, why have different syntaxes for something that is so obviously related?
[[foo|blah]] [[http://foo.com%7Cblah]]
Why not? Is | a valid character in URLs?
Steve