Markdown has this brilliance in that it's not just random markup that produces html or something output, it's own human-targeted plain text output is its own source. A such the link syntax is extremely easy to remember. When I write text, I want to read the label, whose reference is a link, hence the order is label then link. If I wrote this link in pure plain text I'd simply naturally write:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet (http://www.amet.com), consectetur adipiscing elit.
So the order is the same is markdown since it's its own output. Still the world is not ideal so we need a hint to tokenize a little, and since parentheses surround the link, let's use square brackets. This also fits very well with the array/hash/dictionary syntax, where you associate a key sitting between square brackets with a value.
If I want to make a more remote reference so as not to interrupt the reading flow with a big link (remember that markdown source is its own plain text output) I can simply do what I'd do if I inserted a reference, that is annotate the label.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet[1], consectetur adipiscing elit.
The footer naturally follows, as we again assign a key to a value. And since there can be an optional title to the link, it comes afterwards so that urls vertically align.
Again, I find brilliance in Markdown in that it leveraged long (as in decades) established conventions (e.g headers, italics, lists, quotes, code blocks...) that apply directly to plain text in order for the source to be its own output, so that even for someone who doesn't have the first clue about Markdown it's readily readable as if it were not markup.
How so?
Markdown has this brilliance in that it's not just random markup that produces html or something output, it's own human-targeted plain text output is its own source. A such the link syntax is extremely easy to remember. When I write text, I want to read the label, whose reference is a link, hence the order is label then link. If I wrote this link in pure plain text I'd simply naturally write:
So the order is the same is markdown since it's its own output. Still the world is not ideal so we need a hint to tokenize a little, and since parentheses surround the link, let's use square brackets. This also fits very well with the array/hash/dictionary syntax, where you associate a key sitting between square brackets with a value.If I want to make a more remote reference so as not to interrupt the reading flow with a big link (remember that markdown source is its own plain text output) I can simply do what I'd do if I inserted a reference, that is annotate the label.
The footer naturally follows, as we again assign a key to a value. And since there can be an optional title to the link, it comes afterwards so that urls vertically align. Again, I find brilliance in Markdown in that it leveraged long (as in decades) established conventions (e.g headers, italics, lists, quotes, code blocks...) that apply directly to plain text in order for the source to be its own output, so that even for someone who doesn't have the first clue about Markdown it's readily readable as if it were not markup.