alt Hacker News1. Seems unavoidable because there is no natural order for these two elements. It happens that html puts the link first but any time I’m writing I would put the link second.
2. I guess that’s fair. I think parentheses in urls are a bigger issue than parentheses in markdown though. Parentheses in urls often end up percent encoded whether they need to be or not.
> You could say that () was common too, but I’d argue that was just normal linguistic parenthesis rather than URL delimition.
Right. I would say that markdown is inspired more by linguistic styles than markup styles.
You certainly could use <>, but I actually don’t think that matches the way people usually write urls in non-markup formatting. I find it interesting that Gruber chose to use that for autolinks, though.
I do appreciate you clarifying. I see what you mean, at least with respect to all the issues around #2. The more I use markdown, though, the more I come up appreciate this format, specifically because it’s so readable as text. I think it’s a reasonable trade off.
> 1. Seems unavoidable because there is no natural order for these two elements.
There is a solution: restructure it so the href part is inside the link, rather than adjacent to, which is the real problem. reStructuredText had `text <href>`_. In that form, the trailing underscore is a wart, but there’s more justification to it than it may initially seem (where Markdown can have [text] or [text][], reStructuredText’s equivalent is text_ or `text`_). For my own lightweight markup language, I’ve been using [text <href>] for a couple of years (and had {text <href>} before that).
> Parentheses in urls often end up percent encoded whether they need to be or not.
That’s what you can expect from something implementing RFC 3986; but these days, almost everything uses WHATWG’s URL Standard <https://url.spec.whatwg.org/>, under whose rules parentheses are not percent-encoded.
> I actually don’t think that matches the way people usually write urls in non-markup formatting
It isn’t any more, but it used to be very common.