Idea: when parsing “@tmcw” in the markdown part of a notebook, automatically create a link to Tom MacWright | Observable (using the text “@tmcw”, or “Tom MacWright”, or also add the icon…)
Is it too much typing / visual clutter to just type [@tmcw](/@tmcw)
to get @tmcw? I would recommend against adding too many special cases.
Edit: not trying to sound dismissive. Maybe even slight reductions in friction for making social links would be helpful for community building.
Yes, maybe it’s better to keep to the standard. I don’t know.
Heh, yep - I’m not sure either. It would be cool, but it’s also good to stick to the standard (right now our Markdown support is roughly CommonMark-compliant). I think it’ll depend on how much we see people trying to link between notebooks and to users, and that’ll take some time and observation.
One thing you could do is explicitly mention the ability to make links to elsewhere under beta.observable.com by using links like [@tmcw](/@tmcw)
, somewhere in the introductory notebooks.
Comments do support @username
for referring to users, linking to observablehq.com/@username. It might be nice if in comments syntax like @username/notebook#cellname
would expand to observablehq.com/@username/notebook#cellname.