I don't know whether this will be considered useful or harmful, but I got frustrated yesterday with my inability to create links to off-site resources (other web sites, email addresses, etc), and to be able to have the text of a hyperlink show anything other than the exact page name. So, modelling things after Wikipedia, I've added the following simple replacement patterns:

;; Allow pipe-separated page name and text description ("\[\[([^]">|]*?)\|([^]">]*?)\]\]" . "<a href="\1">\2</a>")

;; Standard [[ ]] wiki links ("\[\[(.*?)\]\]" . "<a href="\1">\1</a>")

;; Use single [ ] for external links. Only allow the specified protocols ("\[(http|ftp|mailto|gopher):([^">].*?)\]" . "<a class="external \1" href="\1:\2">\1:\2</a>")

(after getting rid of *wiki-url* in links, I moved the complex wiki-linking code into simple-replace, and complex-translate does nothing)

With these replacements, I can write wiki code like this:

You should really read [[OtherDocument|this other thing]]. Other information is available at this site: [http://www.example.com]

The addition of classes to external links let me visually distinguish them with CSS, and there is deliberately no way for someone to make an external link that looks like a wikilink, to prevent some of the more heinous forms of wiki-spam.

Regards, Ian Clelland clelland@gmail.com