Links/anchors

Links, being an essential part of hypermedia, ought to be first-class citizens in Margin. I can see a few ways of doing this:

Markdown-compatible (would require modifying parser, but less friction for md users): [example.com](my example)

Quasi-HTML (works with parser, harder to “wrap” text to make it a link) [a:example.com]

My vote is for the former. Basically, simple [] is treated as an annotation, while the []() pattern is treated as a link.

I found this cool thing called [Margin](github.com/gamburg/margin)

would parse as

{
               "raw_data": "   I found this cool thing called [Margin](github.com/gamburg/margin)",
               "value": "I found this cool thing called Margin",
               "annotations": {},
               "links": [
                    {"ref": "github.com/gamburg/margin", "value": "Margin"}
               ],
               "children": []
}

[vlmutolo]

Another thought: the parser should probably return regular text for these types of annotations (spanned annotations? restricted? partial? idk what the right name is). And it should also return another field with a list of “spans” and annotations for those spans. The spans should probably be utf8 byte ranges. Not sure how well JS supports that, though.

Example:

A (B [a: example.com])

would be parsed as

{
    "raw_data": …,
    "value": "A B",
    "spans": [
        {
            "start": 2,
            "end": 3,
            "annotations": [{"type": "a", "val":"example.com"}]
        }
    ]
}

That way, applications can easily ignore the spanned annotations.

[vlmutolo]

I think there’s a lot of value to keeping Margin small and simple. The annotations syntax is really powerful. Adding a special case for links seems a bit cluttered when [a: example.com] works so well.

It seems like the real issue is that there’s no way to attach annotations to only part of an item. Maybe the syntax for that could look like a variant of Markdown’s links.

item A has a (link [a: example.com])
item B has regular (text with parentheses)

This is nice because it’s flexible and applies to arbitrary kinds of annotations. Another example:

Calendar
    I have a (doctor’s [name: Dr. Smith]) appointment