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.

I guess this “feature” exists because it was part of the original Markdown.

But having never ever used that, I agree that this does not really make much sense to me, and the word “autolinking” is definitely misleading.

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:

1. I'm using URLs in text, but don't want them to be converted to links (for processing or SEO reasons)
2. 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 the http:// I'd have to use anyway and ensures that the linked text is the only thing being linked.

+++ 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.

As it currently exists you would be in violation of the spec by doing so. The spec is explicit that http://google.ca is not an autolink. Perhaps the spec could include language to allow expansion there?

edit: not an autolink, and what output it should produce