Implicit Link Names

[John Gruber]

european bob <bob at wolfwall.com> wrote on 04/02/04 at 10:51p:

> I think that square brackets would be used too commonly for it to be
> ambiguous. If you're looking at the document, even a human cannot tell
> what the point of the brackets are - are they actually brackets, or are
> they a link? You have to search the document for the nickname to find
> out. I don't particularly like that. For example, is [this] a link?

I agree with this, and it's probably a good summary of why I didn't
start from the get-go supporting just one set of brackets for
implicit links.

I realize that when you *want* to create a link, this:

    [this] is a link

looks very appealing. It's easy to type, and it's easy to read.

The problem is that you can't tell by looking at it if it's supposed
to be a link or not.

Everyone seems to agree that this:

    [this][] is a link

is slightly ugly/kludgy/crufty whatever.

But it's also obvious at a glance that it's a link.

Someone suggestioned this:

    [this]-> is a link

but that's not good enough. It's two characters, and it looks like
it's pointing to the next word.

What else?

    [this]= is a link

Is the only single-character shortcut that comes to mind. I don't
know. In theory I'd like to think of something better than
`[this][]`, but I'm not sure `[this]=` does it for me.

* * *

Here's an idea.

What if we deprecate double-underscores for strong emphasis?
Then we could use double-underscores for implicit link refs:

    [this]__ is a link

The idea being that I don't think many people are, or will ever, use
`__this__` for strong emphasis. Single-character `_` and `*` will
still be used for `<em>`, but `**` would be the only way to mark
something `<strong>`.

`[this]__` is still two characters, but it's easy to type, it's not
going to trigger by accident, the underlinishness resembles a
"link", it strikes me as looking less noisy than `[this][]`.

-J.G.