Why is [a](<b)c> not parsed as an inline link?

This sounds like an implementation issue, but strangely, most (or even all?) CommonMark parsers seem to agree on that: Babelmark 2 - Compare markdown implementations.

To me, it looks like the question is if <b is a valid link destination.
Spec 0.27 says:

A link destination consists of either

  • a sequence of zero or more characters between an opening < and a closing > that contains no spaces, line breaks, or unescaped < or > characters, or

  • a nonempty sequence of characters that does not include ASCII space or control characters, and includes parentheses only if (a) they are backslash-escaped or (b) they are part of a balanced pair of unescaped parentheses that is not itself inside a balanced pair of unescaped parentheses.

… and I would say that it totally fits the description of the second point, doesn’t it?

So why does no CommonMark implementation in babelmark2 recognize it as such?

+++ Matthias Geier [May 07 17 10:08 ]:

So why does no CommonMark implementation in babelmark2 recognize it as
such?

<b)c> is a valid link destination. But in an inline link,
the link destination must be followed by a closing
parenthesis, and it isn’t in your example.

Compare http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=[a](<b)c>)

Thanks @jgm, I appreciate your answer, but it doesn’t really answer my question. There is no doubt that <b)c> is a valid link destination, but that should be irrelevant to my question, shouldn’t it?

As far as I understand the current spec, [a](<b)c> should be parsed as an inline link followed by a literal c>, just as many non-CommonMark parsers do it.

I don’t see a reason why <b shouldn’t be a valid “link destination” in this case, since it perfectly satisfies the second condition (after the first condition fails to match).

So this is either a bug in all CommonMark implementations or I’m mistaken.
Latter seems to be more likely, so please tell me where I’m wrong!

+++ Matthias Geier [May 07 17 14:16 ]:

Thanks [2]@jgm, I appreciate your answer, but it doesn’t really answer
my question. There is no doubt that <b)c> is a valid link destination,
but that should be irrelevant to my question, shouldn’t it?

As far as I understand the current spec, [a](<b)c> should be parsed as
an inline link followed by a literal c>, just as many non-CommonMark
parsers do it.

I don’t see a reason why <b shouldn’t be a valid “link destination” in
this case, since it perfectly satisfies the second condition (after the
first condition fails to match).

Apologies. I misunderstood your point. Yes, there is an
issue here; whether spec or implementations should be fixed
is less clear… It would be useful to put an issue on
the CommonMark tracker.

Done: is [a](<b)c> supposed to be an inline link? · Issue #473 · commonmark/commonmark-spec · GitHub.