Dear Monks,

I'm working on a Web-based bibliography, and I'd like to give users the ability to add links to other items within the database, so that someone could enter, "This is a revised edition of Smith 1998," and end up with "This is a revised edition of Smith 1998", with "Smith 1998" hyperlinked to that database record.

I thought that there would be some obvious way of doing this, so I looked at a few different Wiki engines on the assumption that this was the best model, and was surprised to find that each one I looked at had a totally different way of handling this.

revised edition of [[343|Smith 1998]]

was one,

revised edition of [Smith http://www.mysite.com/biblio/?id=343 1998]

is another, Perlmonks itself has yet another system, with

revised edition of [id://343|Smith 1998].

Are there any discussions of the pros and cons of different systems, or is there anything that's becoming a standard in Perl? Naturally the more I think about it the more I imagine the need for extremely complex things that will annoy uers. I'm using the Template Toolkit for my output engine, if that matters.

Thank you.