In my slogging through markdown editors, previewers, display engines, plugins and the like I keep coming back to Brett Terpstra’s site who seems to be a hub for modern markdown applications.

Conceptual Open Hypermedia

Indeed, one of Bretts plugins for markdown is called ‘searchlink‘. This is a nifty little markdown pre-processor which creates a site of links based on a set of search term directed to a specific search engine resource. This put me in mind of linking and link-bases and as an extension of the Conceptual Open Hypermedia project. The aim of COHSE was to investigate methods to improve significantly the quality, consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents). And if you substitute markdown generation for ‘retrieval time’ and, while not as dynamic as COHSE, you could get SearchLink.

So what does this matter, well I think it is interesting to still see the power of the link-base and the fact that people still want dynamic linking, and the absence of 404s. Keeping this in mind when we build anything which might want to produce or consume links, should be key for all developers.