While that’s not “autolinking” as commonly understood, I think it’s a safer and more precise option than actual autolinking. A couple of cases come to mind:
- I’m using URLs in text, but don’t want them to be converted to links (for processing or SEO reasons)
- I want to explicitly specify a link. With the new TLDs like .travel and .place, traditional auto-linking becomes unreliable. Using the brackets for something like
<air.travel>both lets me omit thehttp://I’d have to use anyway and ensures that the linked text is the only thing being linked.