Wiki markup is recognisable with link conventions [[like this internal link]] and [[like this|http://external/link]] (MediaWiki and Creole; earlier wikis relied solely on CamlCase). Markdown's design is inspired by conventions used in plain-text email, with links [like this][1].

[1] http://site/

That is not how I write plain-text email, and I don't think most people do either.

I write links in plain-text emails as: www.example.com/awesome-video-of-kittens.jsp?referrer=whatever

Note in particular that I don't put http in front, nor do I provide an alternative title.

I don't get it, do you type the URLs by hand, or do you manually cut the http:// from what the browser gives you? Both options seem odd to me.

I didn't notice the browser ads the http.

Anyway it should still understand links without http because if I am typing the link out by hand (say because it is a site I remember) then I would still want it to be a link.

> I didn't notice the browser ads the http.

This is baffling for me. You are not new to the Internet, but until only quite recently, every single browser always showed the protocol is the address bar. Only of late did Google Chrome and then e.g. Mobile Safari remove “http://” from the display to save space; and yes, naturally they include this string when copy-pasting as doing otherwise would result in an incompletely pasted URI (protocols are not optional, except by current convention in non-hypertextual media).

> Markdown's design is inspired by conventions used in plain-text email, with links [like this][1].

And [title](http://url.goes.here) for in-line URLs.

Of course. Either way, it's close to the plain text convention, though one wouldn't bracket the link-name part.

> Markdown is basically another flavor of wiki markup.

One clear advantage of markdown is that its markup is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible to the point that its text/plain rendering is its own source. That's clearly not the case of MediaWiki or even Textile.