Adding an alias to a raw url.

[Brian Forte]

Steve,


>I was mainly thinking back to writing emails, where if I tell a friend;

>

>     why not waste your time on http://www.bored.com?

>

>Then I'm really trying to provide them with a link they can click.


Which is a good argument for including the greater-than and less-than 
de-limiters even with URLs you put in your e-mails.

In my e-mail client the active string above includes the question 
mark, which makes the URL fail when it's passed to my browser.

OTOH, if you wrote

      why not waste your time on <http://www.bored.com>?

almost every e-mail client I'm aware of will honour the delimit 
characters and restrict the URL to the string between them.

I hesitate to guess at John's thinking, but I've always half-assumed he made

      <[URL here]>

strings auto-anchors (to coin an ugly phrase) in Markdown in 
imitation of his (and other's) e-mail writing habit of delimiting 
URLs in plain text with the greater-than and less-than characters to 
ensure they didn't get munged as your 'url plus question mark' string 
did above.

Regards,

Brian Forte.
-- 
Brian Forte, <mailto:bforte at betweenborders.com>
Writer, editor, scripter, dangerous mind.