1. People have a hard time remembering the order and which characters to use. The most common error I see is (text)[href]. Spaces in between the [text] and (href) is also common.
2. ( and ) are URL code points: they can exist in URLs without being percent-encoded. This means that you can’t just paste or emit regularly serialised URLs, you also need to change any ( to %28 and ) to %29.
To fix it, you start out by using <> to delimit the URL instead of (). This fixes the serialised URL problem (< and > aren’t URL code points), and it was the traditional delimition of URLs too, where delimition was required. You could say that () was common too, but I’d argue that was just normal linguistic parenthesis rather than URL delimition. Markdown even uses <> as URL delimition already, but only for links with no custom text (called “automatic links” in Gruber’s definition, “autolinks” in CommonMark): “https://example.com” is just text, “<https://example.com>” makes it a link.
As for the way of adding a title attribute to a link, that shows that the parentheses aren’t even actually delimiting the URL. And then you get into the mess that’s […] and […][…], in addition to […](…). It’s an ill-considered mess.
Anything that doesn't force you to remember arbitrary ordering - square brackets first? Or parentheses? It's the textual equivalent of plugging in usb upside down.
An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link.
My feeling overall is that I can't get into flow writing Markdown, there are just enough things wrong that I never feel completely comfortable while doing it.
It seems that in the HTML 5 age there is some subset of HTML which should be completely satisfying for anyone. Maybe it is custom components that work like JSX (e.g. <footnote>) or something like tailwind. Editing HTML with one eye on a live view is more pleasant for me than anything else. Every kind of rich editor that looks like Microsoft Word (esp. Word!) comes across as a dull tool where selections, navigation, and applying styles almost work. There's got to be some kind of conceptual problem at the root of it all that makes fixing it like pushing around a bubble under the rug. I want to believe in Dreamweaver but 2-second latency to process keystrokes on AMD's best CPU from 2 years ago and the incredulous attitude Adobe support has about the problem makes it a non-started [1]
[1] if I ran an OS failing to update the UI in 0.2 sec gives an immediate kill -9 and telemetry of the event will get you dropped out of the app store not much later. I'm not saying rendering has to be settled in 0.2 sec but there has to be some response that feels... responsive.
To my memory, people had been using [link](url) and similar styling for a long time on old web forums and even BBSes.
Be glad they didn’t adopt Everything2’s “pipe link” syntax: [link|url]. Or maybe it was [url|link]? It’s been well over two decades, I don’t remember anymore.
I have never heard of [text](url) being used before Markdown. “text (url)” or “text <url>”, leaving the reader to infer which words the URL applied to, sure; but among formats that provided a span for the link text, I think Markdown may have been the first to use a spelling of two adjacent delimited parts. [urltext], [text|url], [url="url"]text[/url], et cetera, seen them all.
dpark|1 month ago
chrismorgan|1 month ago
1. People have a hard time remembering the order and which characters to use. The most common error I see is (text)[href]. Spaces in between the [text] and (href) is also common.
2. ( and ) are URL code points: they can exist in URLs without being percent-encoded. This means that you can’t just paste or emit regularly serialised URLs, you also need to change any ( to %28 and ) to %29.
To fix it, you start out by using <> to delimit the URL instead of (). This fixes the serialised URL problem (< and > aren’t URL code points), and it was the traditional delimition of URLs too, where delimition was required. You could say that () was common too, but I’d argue that was just normal linguistic parenthesis rather than URL delimition. Markdown even uses <> as URL delimition already, but only for links with no custom text (called “automatic links” in Gruber’s definition, “autolinks” in CommonMark): “https://example.com” is just text, “<https://example.com>” makes it a link.
As for the way of adding a title attribute to a link, that shows that the parentheses aren’t even actually delimiting the URL. And then you get into the mess that’s […] and […][…], in addition to […](…). It’s an ill-considered mess.
evnp|1 month ago
An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link.
PaulHoule|1 month ago
It seems that in the HTML 5 age there is some subset of HTML which should be completely satisfying for anyone. Maybe it is custom components that work like JSX (e.g. <footnote>) or something like tailwind. Editing HTML with one eye on a live view is more pleasant for me than anything else. Every kind of rich editor that looks like Microsoft Word (esp. Word!) comes across as a dull tool where selections, navigation, and applying styles almost work. There's got to be some kind of conceptual problem at the root of it all that makes fixing it like pushing around a bubble under the rug. I want to believe in Dreamweaver but 2-second latency to process keystrokes on AMD's best CPU from 2 years ago and the incredulous attitude Adobe support has about the problem makes it a non-started [1]
[1] if I ran an OS failing to update the UI in 0.2 sec gives an immediate kill -9 and telemetry of the event will get you dropped out of the app store not much later. I'm not saying rendering has to be settled in 0.2 sec but there has to be some response that feels... responsive.
TimorousBestie|1 month ago
Be glad they didn’t adopt Everything2’s “pipe link” syntax: [link|url]. Or maybe it was [url|link]? It’s been well over two decades, I don’t remember anymore.
chrismorgan|1 month ago