[nebabyte]

> They should! Why aren’t they!?!?! Somebody needs to make that a markdown extension. Every time you want to insert an indexed footnote, you type [^#]

Probably because there's no elegant way to support all the potential edge cases of that default behavior. For instance, if you introduced a reference with that format, you can't refer to it later - if you use the static number and it changes, you're now pointing to the wrong reference. So it reduces to using names, and the hassle of coming up with a name for each new link or footnote reduces to just using numbers - so the only thing that needs to be supported is manually named or numbered items.

The author correctly describes the ideal solution - a plugin that replaces unnamed links before saving or such - but likely fails to understand why that (as opposed to adding behavioral cruft to a markup language) is the correct level of abstraction for such a solution. Imagine if a project like wikipedia was riddled with the ambiguity of dozens of people's various attempts to wrangle the autonumbering to their writing.

[zeveb]

Interestingly (and IMHO unsurprisingly) org-mode does this correctly[0]. Footnotes are identified by 'fn:' and a unique token (of course, numbers are unique tokens); they can be easily inserted with C-c C-x f, and can also be renumbered — including normalisation.

I reminded of this discussion from a week and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15321850

IMHO org-mode is, as the original author puts it, 'one of the most reasonable markup languages to use for text.' I suggest that rather than trying to improve Markdown, folks just use org-mode instead.

[0] http://orgmode.org/manual/Footnotes.html

[thomastjeffery]

I still think that org-mode and Markdown have quite different targets.

org-mode seeks to be organized and manipulable, whereas Markdown seeks to be readable, and parsable.