Tightening the rules for literal `[` and `]` chars in link ids

[John Gruber]

Jacob Rus <jrus at hcs.harvard.edu> wrote on 9/25/06 at 4:42 PM:


> It has always seemed to me that links should just be 

> "[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9._-]+", and maybe 2-3 other characters, but as few as 

> possible.  There's no reason for a reference name that no one will ever 

> see to have a creative title with lots of punctuation.


I disagree. To date, Markdown's liberal policy on the allowable
characters for link reference IDs hasn't generated any complaints.
Today's stuff about disallowing `[` and `]` is for good reason.
Why would you want to disallow more characters than that?

Spaces, for certain, need to be included. And don't forget
non-ASCII alphabet characters, (é, ü, etc.)

Nor do I see any problem with obscure punctuation in a link ref ID. For example, for this entry on Daring Fireball:

  <http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/july#tue-25-watanabe>

I used the following source:

    I can't complain -- I certainly didn't invent the
    star-in-circle. If he weren't dead, I'm sure I'd have gotten a
    call from [Chuck Taylor][✪] by now.
    
    [✪]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Taylor_%28salesman%29

-J.G.