Implicit Link Names

[european bob]

On Sun, 2004-04-04 at 01:38, Jelks Cabaniss wrote:
> I don't really understand the problem some people seem to be having with
> [this] -- is it just that you can't tell *immediately* without moving your
> eyeballs (or in extreme cases, your scrollbar)?

You can't tell if it's not a link without moving your scrollbar in _all_
cases; unless the document is very short.

> To me, that's like saying you don't exactly how a CSS class attribute 
> might render an element without looking it up, therefore we should
> deprecate class and all move to pure inline CSS!  :)

That's a bad analogy, since with CSS class selectors you're not
especially worried about how the document will look on output. 

Having to resort to scanning the document or outputting it to see how it
interprets an element seems bad to me. 

> How about both?  Keep [this][] for consistancy with the explicit syntax (hey
> -- it's already implemented!:) and add [[this]] for the "visual clarity"
> version.

I agree, I like [[this]]. However, we're going around in circles - this
has already been suggested and thought of as "not a significant
improvement" (it certainly doesn't save any characters; we're basically
just arguing over the position of the final [).

However, the issue is probably quite an important one, because if
something like that is implemented it would almost immediately become
the predominant form of linking (I think). [This] is therefore nice from
the Huffman point of view, but is quite collidey (in my opinion, of
course) and ambiguous. 

--bob.