web commit by tuomov: Since this old proposition isn't listed here yet...

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+Markdown supports nice short links to external sites within body text by references defined elsewhere in the source:
+
+        foo [bar][ref]
+
+        [ref]: http://example.invalid/
+
+It would be nice to be able to do this or something like this for wikilinks as well, so that you can have long page names without the links cluttering the body text. I think the best way to do this would be to move wikilink resolving after HTML generation: parse the HTML with a proper HTML parser, and replace relative links with links to the proper files (plus something extra for missing pages).
+
+A related possibility would be to move a lot of "preprocessing" after HTML generation as well (thus avoiding some conflicts with the htmlifier), by using special tags for the preprocessor stuff. (The old preprocessor could simply replace links and directives with appropriate tags, that the htmlifier is supposed to let through as-is. Possibly the htmlifier plugin could configure the format.)
+
+Other alternatives would be
+
+  * to understand the source format, but this seems too much work with all the supported formats; or
+
+  * something like the shortcut plugin for external links, with additional support for specifying the link text, but the syntax would be much more cumbersome then.
+