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In the recent months, I've seen that many friends (many of them coders) started writing, long, elaborate mails with footnotes for link, meaning that they write paragraphs [1] and then [2] put the links at the bottom [3]. Like this.

[1] www.example.com/1
[2] www.example.com/2
[3] www.example.com/3

I think it is smart and everything, but I don't understand the process of putting the numbers while you write: I put the reference both when I write and when I edit the text, I swap paragraphs, thus I make a mess with numbers.

Is it a common practice used by some community or is there some editor/plugin that automatically puts the right number in footnotes? Is this mutated from Markdown?

BadFeelingAboutThis
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Aubrey
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    This doesn't seem like a programming question, and also appears to be a software recommendation question, so it is doubley off-topic. Try asking the friends you have who you say are doing this. – Quentin Dec 18 '14 at 10:11
  • I knew it was borderline for the site, but I thought it was a case of best practice in the programming culture, thus it kinda belonged here. I'm still not sure if it is or not a software recommendation question, that's the problem. If I'm mistaken, I can delete the question. – Aubrey Dec 18 '14 at 10:31
  • First of all if you'll use a markdown editor the mail would be encoded like HTML and the notes will be rendered as links (not plain text). Then by your title and your question is not clear if you want to discover some sort of best practice among a community or a software to write mail in markdown that render your mail not in markdown. Either case I think is off-topic. – Giulio Bonanome Dec 18 '14 at 18:44

1 Answers1

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definitely is not Markdown, that compile in HTML, so you should see an anchor instead of plain text.

I think could be an habit from people that want to send plain text mail (not HTML encoded) without use URL inside paragraph to keep readability. Maybe influenced by Markdown emerging community, where square brackets are used for footnotes. Instead of wiki-markup or LaTeX that use curly brackets for footnotes.

For a quick example, check the very own StackOverflow flavored markdown for links.

Maybe you should also check W3C Web Annotation Working Group for some news.

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Giulio Bonanome
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