OutOfLineURL

When I and most of the people who submit things write paragraphs, they've usually got one or two words in the middle of a paragraph or sentance that they want inside the anchor tag. The current syntax really discourages URLS except at the end of a sentance.

If backticks are deemed unsafe, we might use a markup similar to the existing convention of "footnoting." Observe:

    Today I'm going to talk about the "three-spined stickleback"[1], one of
    my favorite fish, if for no other reason than its melodius name.

    .. [1] http://www.waterland.net/visschenwinkel/threestickle.htm

This should become:

Today I'm talking about the three-spined stickleback, one of my favorite fish, if for no other reason than its melodius name.

This has the added benefit of permitting multiple URLs? unambiguously linked in a single paragraph. --datagrok (Mike Lamb)

Bug: there should be no <a href> tag in my quoted text.

Today I'm going to talk about the `three-spined stickleback`, one of my favorite fish, if for no other reason than its melodius name.

http://www.waterland.net/visschenwinkel/threestickle.htm

This should become:

Today I'm talking about the three-spined stickleback, one of my favorite fish, if for no other reason than its melodius name.

I think backticks are safe. The basic rule is that if a paragraph that is followed by an URL alone on one line contains a phrase enclosed by backticks, make the phrase the content of an anchor tag and the URL the value of the href attribute.

Alternative