Automatically convert links to a href's

[cmdcolin]

Not sure if this is already supported but it would be great if links in plaintext could automatically converted active with tags

I know github allows this type of thing with their markdown so that would be a cool feature to include

[preaction]

It's not already supported, to my knowledge: Markdown has a special syntax to do it, though: <http://example.com>. The angle brackets make the URL inside into a link with the link text being the URL itself. However, I have also been bit by this enough that I wish it just automatically linking anything that looked like a URL (<schema>:<thing>).

There are some surmountable issues:

• Generally linking anything that matches /[a-z]+:\S+/ would create a lot of false-positives. A good way to reduce this would be to restrict only to some set of URL schemas. What URL <schema> should be supported?
• I often do things like (http://example.com) expecting it to end up like (<http://example.com>). Some programs I use, though, end up making (<http://example.com)>. We'll want to do this the right way, with a closing paren or bracket not being part of the link if there is a matching opening paren/bracket.

If this is already supported by the Markdown module we use (Text::Markdown), then we should focus our efforts there. Otherwise, we might have to change what Markdown module we use by default. Another option is Text::MultiMarkdown, which is more likely to already support this.

We should also, in the meantime, document how to add <http://example.com> links to content documents in the Statocles content guide. It looks like I have neglected the Links section on that page...