'''Provide a link scheme for short, footnote-like external links.'''

We currently have several link schemes for links pointing to external resources, basically

{{{
http://www.example.com
}}}

for the raw URL, and

{{{
[http://www.example.com RfC2606]
}}}

for a named link. (For more link schemes see SyntaxReference.)

Sometimes you don't want to have all the long URL in your text, but you don't want to make a specific word, or the whole sentence a link, either. You just want to provide links to one or more sources for what you said, just like footnotes. E.g.:

''!OpenOffice is not just a collection of several office programms, it is designed as an office '''suite'''''.

Now assume you want to give a link to an official project web page, where anybody can check your statement, which solution for a link would you prefer?

 1. ''!OpenOffice is not just a collection of several office programms, it is designed as an office '''suite''', see http://www.openoffice.org/product/suite.html.''
 1. ''!OpenOffice is not just a collection of several office programms, it is designed as an [[http://www.openoffice.org/product/suite.html|office '''suite''']]''.
 1. ''!OpenOffice is not just a collection of several office programms, it is designed as an office '''suite''' ([[http://www.openoffice.org/product/suite.html|source]])''.
##new list
 * The first solution is ugly and makes the text difficult to read.
 * Second solution - upps, no markup allowed in links, too bad. However, your intention was not to provide an explanation for the word `office suite`, you wanted to give a reference for your statement.
 * So, the third solution would do the job, but it is not very convenient.

'''Proposed solution:'''

Introduce an URL link scheme that creates automatically footnote-like links, alike:

''!OpenOffice is not just a collection of several office programms, it is designed as an office '''suite'''.'' [[http://www.openoffice.org/product/suite.html|1]]

Where the number is a counter automatically set by the wiki engine, i.e. the second occurrence of a link of that type would read `2`, the third `3`, and so on.

We could recycle the following link scheme for that job:

{{{
[http://www.example.com]
}}}

which currently renders exactly like

{{{
http://www.example.com
}}}

so that

{{{
[http://www.example.com]
}}}

would be rendered as

~-^[1]^-~ (but as a link)

while

{{{
http://www.example.com
}}}

continues to be rendered as 

http://www.example.com

I have to admit that this feature is already implemented in MediaWiki - but who says competition is bad? :-) - I just realized that the Usemod wiki engine has exactly the same feature, with exactly the same syntax as proposed here. Now we ''have'' to implement it. :D

Note that the GUI editor is currently destroying this kind of link syntax, i.e. a source code like `[http://www.example.net]` will be altered into `http://www.example.net` when opening the page in the GUI editor.


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CategoryFeatureRequest