Markdown Discuss - Feb 2010 - markdown's reference links with the implicit name syntax - improvement suggestion?!?

I like to use markdown's reference links with the implicit name syntax.  It
allows keeping a table of links seperate from the referencing link.

However, what I don't like is that I have no way of (optionally) including
the table of links in the markdown's output.

For instance, in the example:


I get 10 times more traffic from [Google][] than from
[Yahoo][] or [MSN][].

  [google]: http://google.com/        "Google"
  [yahoo]:  http://search.yahoo.com/  "Yahoo Search"
  [msn]:    http://search.msn.com/    "MSN Search"

The hypertext it produces is fine, and includes the links as defined by the
reference links.  But I would like additionally to be able to have the table of
links appears elsewhere in the html output.

Is there some way of extending markdown in this direction.

Perhaps a syntax like [][] would produce a table of links, and [][id1,id2] would
produce the table for just links with ids of id1 or id2.....

Malcolm Cook
Stowers Institute for Medical Research -  Bioinformatics
Kansas City, Missouri  USA

> Is there some way of extending markdown in this direction.
It really depends on what you mean by "markdown".

Historically, proposals for extending the reference implementations do
not tend to go very far. Note that the last official release of
Markdown.pl was in 2004... With alternative implementations, your
chances are little bitter. Michel occasionally incorporates really
promising suggestions into PHP Markdown Extra. (I am guessing it would
need to be a lot more compelling.) We, of Python Markdown, tend to
remind people who ask for new features that we offer an extension
framework [1] that would allow you to change Python Markdown to do
things like you suggest in a few dozen lines of code.

- yuri

[1]: http://www.freewisdom.org/projects/python-markdown/Writing_Extensions