This is not intuitive UX, especially for non-technical bloggers.
It’s particularly unintuitive because page names are not memorable enough to write links in generally. I mean MAYBE someone would through in an (about) perhaps.
The only way I can see prioritising internal links is if you build another feature: make it easier to link to previous posts, e.g. by allowing copy & paste previous Posts to obtain the relative link.
I often type in web addresses manually.
To be fair, I use link shortening services with patterns (e.g. Ceru.li/songname for my songs for example) more than most probably.
My qualm relates to the broader point that the 8 characters is too much for a ubiquitous part of address. My town-mate Tim Berners-Lee himself admitted he should have just done http: without the two slashes!
Hey: at least Google are binning www. meaning that there’s not 12 characters of cruft needing to be typed. The one good thing Google have done recently.
Ah yes! Manually typing URLs is not a thing I do very often but I agree it would be useful for those occasions, such as with short URLs.
I would imagine most non-technical bloggers are more likely to use a share function of some kind (share sheet, etc) rather than typing out an address. Also, the iOS app recently got auto-fill from the clipboard whenever you use the Markdown link button.
Still, I agree it would be good to see manual typists catered for either way.
Not necessarily Markdown itself, but how Hugo (the blog engine that powers Micro.blog) interprets links. There’s a lot of magic there to try and make rel links work easy for folks link to static files around their site, and I don’t think this is something super modifiable.
I think we’re going to keep requiring the “http” part of URLs. Micro.blog will auto-link full URLs without requiring the Markdown, but I’ve found with similar features that if I try to make it too clever, it tends to increase the chance of other unrelated problems, and makes documenting the behavior more difficult.
I could see improving the macOS app’s “Format” menu → “Link” command to be smarter about this, though, since it wouldn’t affect anything else in Micro.blog.
