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Certainly would save a bit of time - not just in publishing, but in reading. |
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Simple, we don't want to break compatibility with John Gruber's Markdown syntax for that. It is really easy to wrap any URL with a less-than and a greater-than symbol and make it a hotlink, and there's always the toolbar link tool. By not deviating from compliant Markdown, we hope that we may be able to provide useful federation and interoperability support in future versions. 2
Some would argue that John, himself, is broken. If it's possible to auto-hyperlink a URL by using less-than/greater-than symbols, then why not auto-insert them when a user keys in a URL without knowing the markdown syntax? That would be a bit more intuitive. This is the kind of thing that freaks out people who aren't developers, mind you. Unless you've indirectly already answered the question.
(06 Jun '10, 14:31)
Chris Pirillo
Auto-inserting the correct syntax may be an option. We wish to interact with other sources of Markdown-encoded text, so breaking compatibility is not something we will do lightly.
(06 Jun '10, 14:42)
rickross ♦♦
It seems pretty non-destructive. The two-way compatibility picture looks like:
Since you're not introducing incompatible markup, and since you respect the markup when it does exist, I don't see a problem.
(07 Dec '10, 15:55)
mattdm
Who gives a crap about the purity of the Markdown syntax? If someone types a URL, they want a link. If someone sees a URL they don't want to select it and paste it, they want it to be a link.
(09 Dec '10, 21:53)
Blake Househ...
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I'm seeing quite a few plain-text non-linked URLs right here on http://meta.osqa.net/. The fact that they exist on this site should be an indicator that there's a problem.
Well, we have decided for the present to support standard markdown, which does not automatically hyperlink. It is trivial to use the <> notation, so maybe we just need to make it more clear how to do that.