[Doc-SIG] Call for opinions on "inline external targets" idea

[Moore, Paul]

From: Tony J Ibbs (Tibs) [mailto:tony@lsl.co.uk]
> Garth Kidd wrote:
> > I strongly prefer the current way of doing it. Inline is
> > spectactularly messy, IMHO.
> 
> I vehemently agree with Garth (gosh, that's nice) and David

FWIW (not much, as I don't use reST much for this type of thing) I agree as
well. The proposed syntax is far too punctuation-heavy, and any of the
alternatives discussed are ambiguous or too subtle.

>     Talked to X, Y and Z from ABC (http://www.....)
[...]
> why doesn't Simon write a transformer/filter for docutils that takes a
> Docutils tree, finds all the URLs that are in parentheses, and shifts
> them out of line - i.e., backwards onto the preceding interpreted text
> or single "word".?
> 
> Thus he would type my example above, but after filtering, the *result*
> would be as if he had typed::
> 
>     Talked to X, Y and Z from ABC_
> 
>     .. _ABC: http://www.....

The problem, as I understand it, is that Simon wants to do this for
*relative* URLs, so he's looking at

    Talked to X, Y and Z from ABC (localfile.htm)

which reST won't pick up as a link. So the transformer won't see link nodes,
which leaves us back at parsing raw text.

Paul.