Implicit Link Names

[european bob]

On Sat, 2004-04-03 at 15:08, John Gruber wrote:
> The problem is that you can't tell by looking at it if it's supposed
> to be a link or not.

Agreed. The more I think about [this], the less I like it. Although, if
it were available, I would almost certainly use it. But then I would
probably implement an xMarkdown mode where [] had to be escaped to be
literal, which would be the only way I could lessen my personal pain I
think. It would have to be one or the other; I wouldn't want both.

>     [this][] is a link
> 
> is slightly ugly/kludgy/crufty whatever.

I think there will always be a problem showing links in text, because it
simply doesn't have them. I'm not utterly convinced the above is so
terrible.

> Someone suggestioned this:
> 
>     [this]-> is a link

Hehe, me probably :o)

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

Indeed. It was supposed to evoke travel. I also suggested [link]>
(similar), and [link]^ or [link]~ would be similar.

>     [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.

No, [this]= doesn't really do anything for me either. Out of the single
characters, [this]~ is the best for me. But that might be highly
personal. I'm not sure it's really that great.

> `[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][]`.

Hmm. My initial instinct is that it's not particularly a solution,
although it may grow on me. It still looks odd. [this][] does at least
have the attribute of looking link a simplified/abbreviated version of
something, whereas __ strikes me more as some kind of modifier. 

If there's no particular nice alternative to [this], can we attack the
problem by chasing the other ambiguity - i.e., by somehow noting when
you want the brackets to _not_ indicate a link? Which is going to be
more popular - using brackets to denote links, or for other uses? My
instinct is that creating links would be more popular, and therefore
deserves the shorter form, but I may be wrong. \[this] does at least
look escaped-ish, and therefore 'literal', and you have the \-escapes
notion already in Markdown. Is that a goer?

--bob.