[this] as a synonym for [this][]

[Michel Fortin]

Le 1 avr. 2005, à 14:49, John Gruber a écrit :

> I think it's important to remember that the vast majority of Markdown 
> users aren't exposing their raw Markdown to readers. And even I'm only 
> doing it as a sort of trick to help people get the gist and feel for 
> the syntax.

You have a point here. But people learning Markdown will still need to 
look at the Markdown source of others, and I think any ambigus syntax 
here may turn some of them down. My point here is that making the 
syntax harder to read is making the syntax harder to learn too, since 
people love learning with examples.

When someone see `[this][]`, `[this]()`, or even `[[this]]`, he may not 
think it's a link prior knowing Markdown, but he cannot associate it 
with anything else either. So it's easy to learn. But with `[this]` my 
first though is that it's an edit in a quote or a note, not a link. 
Markdown tries to override something I'm already used to and my mind 
fight this.

This, and the possibility for it to collide unpredictably with a link 
reference far away in a document -- even if you only use `[this][]` for 
links -- makes me think supporting `[this]` for links is not really a 
good idea. Of course it looks a little better and that's two less 
brackets to type, but this doesn't weigh the inconveniences in my 
opinion.

> Now that I have this hooked up in code, I really enjoy using it. It 
> really looks so much better to me in manuscript form than `[this][]`.

I have the feeling this means there won't be any turnaround. ;-)

Many people won't care and I think most won't be turned down learning 
Markdown because of this. Adding the `[link]` syntax won't be 
catastrophic for Markdown. And I will surly continue to use it myself. 
I just think that the small advantages of this new syntax are outweigh 
by the small disadvantages.


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/