[sbierwagen]

Any reason Twitter just doesn't let you use HTML anchors, and skip this whole mess?

[cmelbye]

That would be incredibly unhelpful. It's much more to type, it's yet another thing to sanitize, and most users don't know HTML.

[makmanalp]

You just do: visible_text|url , or maybe that whole thing in brackets. It turns it into an anchor. There, was that so hard?

[cmelbye]

Or you could just type in the URL. Oh wait, that's exactly what Twitter is doing.