Links

To create an inline link, use a set of regular parentheses immediately after the link text's closing square bracket. Inside the parentheses, put the URL where you want the link to point, along with an optional title for the link, surrounded in quotes. For example:

This is [an example](http://example.com/ "Title") inline link.

[This link](http://example.net/) has no title attribute.

Will produce:

<p>This is <a href="http://example.com/" title="Title">
an example</a> inline link.</p>

<p><a href="http://example.net/">This link</a> has no
title attribute.</p>

If you're referring to a local resource on the same server, you can use relative paths:

See my [About](/about/) page for details.

Specifying HTML attributes in markdown

To add one or more attributes to a markdown link, you can use the following space-delimited format:

[link text](url){: attribute="value" attribute2="value2" attribute3="value3"}

You can alert readers that a link will lead to an external site by adding {: .external} to the syntax.

Reference-style links use a second set of square brackets, inside which you place a label of your choosing to identify the link:

This is [an example][id] reference-style link.

You can optionally use a space to separate the sets of brackets:

This is [an example] [id] reference-style link.

Then, anywhere in the document, you define your link label like this, on a line by itself:

The link URL may, optionally, be surrounded by angle brackets:

You can put the title attribute on the next line and use extra spaces or tabs for padding, which tends to look better with longer URLs:

Link definition names may consist of letters, numbers, spaces, and punctuation -- but they are not case sensitive. E.g. these two links:

[link text][a]
[link text][A]

are equivalent.

The implicit link name shortcut allows you to omit the name of the link, in which case the link text itself is used as the name. Just use a set of square brackets -- e.g., to link the word "Google" to the google.com web site, you could simply write:

[Google]

And then define the link:

Because link names may contain spaces, this shortcut even works for multiple words in the link text:

Visit [Daring Fireball] for more information.

And then define the link:

Link definitions can be placed anywhere in your Markdown document. I tend to put them immediately after each paragraph in which they're used, but if you want, you can put them all at the end of your document, sort of like footnotes.

Here's an example of reference links in action:

I get 10 times more traffic from [Google] [1] than from
[Yahoo] [2] or [MSN] [3].

Using the implicit link name shortcut, you could instead write:

I get 10 times more traffic from [Google] than from
[Yahoo] or [MSN].

Both of the above examples will produce the following HTML output:

<p>I get 10 times more traffic from <a href="http://google.com/"
title="Google">Google</a> than from
<a href="http://search.yahoo.com/" title="Yahoo Search">Yahoo</a>
or <a href="http://search.msn.com/" title="MSN Search">MSN</a>.</p>

For comparison, here is the same paragraph written using Markdown's inline link style:

I get 10 times more traffic from [Google](http://google.com/ "Google")
than from [Yahoo](http://search.yahoo.com/ "Yahoo Search") or
[MSN](http://search.msn.com/ "MSN Search").

Markdown supports a shortcut style for creating "automatic" links for URLs and email addresses: simply surround the URL or email address with angle brackets. What this means is that if you want to show the actual text of a URL or email address, and also have it be a clickable link, you can do this:

<http://example.com/>

Markdown will turn this into:

<a href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a>

Automatic links for email addresses work similarly, except that Markdown will also perform a bit of randomized decimal and hex entity-encoding to help obscure your address from address-harvesting spambots. For example, Markdown will turn this:

<address@example.com>

into something like this:

<a href="&#x6D;&#x61;i&#x6C;&#x74;&#x6F;:&#x61;&#x64;&#x64;&#x72;&#x65;
&#115;&#115;&#64;&#101;&#120;&#x61;&#109;&#x70;&#x6C;e&#x2E;&#99;&#111;
&#109;">&#x61;&#x64;&#x64;&#x72;&#x65;&#115;&#115;&#64;&#101;&#120;&#x61;
&#109;&#x70;&#x6C;e&#x2E;&#99;&#111;&#109;</a>

which will render in a browser as a clickable link to "address@example.com".