Markdown in Python: Unexpected link reference behavior

ticket id
000049

status
open

priority
???

assigned to
NOBODY

Reported by: Jason Ford
Component:

If you create a reference to a URL, but don't define it later, you get an unclosed tag. It seems that desired behavior would be for the link to be ignored.

Example:

CouchDB is a document-oriented database

If the second line above is omitted (which can happen on accident fairly easily if your text has a lot of links in it) you get an unclosed tag. If your entire Markdown text was just this single line, without defining the [CouchDB] reference...

CouchDB is a document-oriented database

...then the desired HTML output would be:

CouchDB is a document-oriented database

or maybe even drop the brackets all-together to fail more gracefully:

CouchDB is a document-oriented database

This seems to be a bug since one of the primary reasons (at least from my perspective) in using Markdown, is to prevent accidental HTML syntax errors like the unclosed tag this scenario is generating.