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.
The fact that Meteor wish to call this Rockdown suggests to me it is to change it.
By creating a specification and tests, they will be modifying Markdown even if just subtly enough to remove bugs and ambiguity. Doing even that is to create something that isn't Markdown, existing Markdown parsers may do something different with the same text... so clearly this isn't Markdown.
It may share 90% (or more, or less) similarity with Markdown, but some areas would certainly need tweaking and changing to make the goal (specification, testability, consistent implementations) possible.
To my understanding this means that Rockdown is Markdown inspired/derived.
And as such, that there is a hope that a good specification and the ability to be implemented in a testable and consistent way... will, by mass use (on the sites mentioned), eventually result in Rockdown superseding Markdown.
In my universe, I'm simply looking to get rid of bbcode as the markup syntax of choice. And if you were at the support end of trying to tell people how to insert images on forums then you'd understand that the Markdown syntax is a real difficulty for a lot of people.
The path that I prefer is to use Markdown, but the areas that cause the greatest difficulty in usability testing, to modify those to make things more implicit and frictionless. Worrying about []() (or vice versa) is an obstacle to the user that shouldn't exist. But if everything else is good from a user perspective then I definitely want to keep that stuff.
I still get those the wrong way around [text url] often enough. I only mess up MarkDown slightly less often because I write more of it.
The "() is more common than [] in regular text, so it makes parsing-sense to start a special markup code with []" is going to help me with that, though. That particular mnemonic only works for coders, though :)
Also, doesn't MediaWiki syntax sometimes also have a pipe | between the url and the text in a link? Or is that only for internal links?
