+++ andre_d [Sep 03 14 20:43 ]:
Currently in this spec autolinking is not automatic, autolinks must be
inside <>. What is the thinking behind this? Many production
implementations of markdown automatically link all matching URLs.
Adding another slightly more convenient way to link to URLs without a
title is not really autolinking, just different linking syntax. The
spec is explicit about not automatically linking a URL without the <>
around it.
It is actually very difficult to give accurate heuristics for
recognizing URLs (which might include punctuation) without including
trailing punctuation. Putting these messy heuristics into the spec
seemed the wrong thing to do. There are fast libraries for autolinking
that can be run over the output of stmd, such as
rinku, so our thought was that the
markdown implementation itself need not do this.