I was reading damiross’s post on Murtha, and noticed his URL tag for “rider” was broken. I couldn’t see anything malformed in the tag, so I fiddled with it myself using the Preview button (which is a great tool, BTW).
His original URL was en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_(legislation including the parens around legislation. He buried it inside the URL tag so that only the word “rider” would show in the post. His syntax was correct,
[ridere](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_(legislation))
and normally that works fine, but not this time.
I suspected the parens and tested them first. Quoting his message as posted, I first removed the close paren after “legislation”, but that still doesn’t work. So I continued, also removing the open paren before Rider, resulting in
[rider](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_legislation)
and that works, (as previous link demonstrates) but it points to a page that wikipedia doesn’t have: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_legislation
In summary, we can’t use the correct address and also get it to work inside the URL tag. It looks like the parser for the URL tag gets rattled by the parens, abandons the procedure for attaching a link to the selected text, and instead shows all of them – URL tag, address, and text – together in the message, without a clickable link. It’s not as elegant that way.
It doesn’t come up often, but it just did, and will crop up with ongoing use of wikipedia references and increasingly sophisticated URL-posting skills. So I just want to add this to your list…