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
[CouchDB]: http://couchdb.apache.org/

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.

Since this bug tracker is using Markdown to display the text entered here, I should be able to demonstrate the bug. Let's try linking to [Django][]. If I don't define the Django link reference, we get all the rest of this text being in an unclosed anchor.

Well that didn't actually generate the bug, did it? Maybe this implementation of Markdown is not using Markdown in Python (which would make sense since I see .cgi in the page URL). I experienced the bug in Django using the Markup module with Markdown in Python.