Implicit Link Names

[european bob]

On Sat, 2004-04-03 at 16:36, John Gruber wrote:
> I think it's too drastic to require literal brackets to be escaped
> all the time. The whole point of Markdown's link syntax is that it
> should almost never collide with literal brackets.

Indeed, all too true. I was almost going to suggest some kind of rule
about the content of the [] too (e.g., must be a link if it contains a
space, or something) but those are also crude and unworkable.

> We're trying to have our cake and eat it too

:o) Nothing wrong with that.

Is there any possibility of looking at different delimiters? [] appears
to have some problems due to the commonality of usage, and () would
suffer the same problem. Maybe we could overload <> a bit more? E.g., if
it contains a URL, make it a link to that URL, otherwise make it an
implicit link? Then you would have <this> as a link instead. 

There may actually be no real solution to this at all, of course ;)

--bob.