For links within PM, I prefer it when people use [...]. When they write their own <a href... tags, they almost invariably do not use a relative URL but some form of absolute URL back to PM. Since PM is available at more than one host name, that is usually different from the domain for one person's login cookie or another. The shortcuts remove that concern.

Part of that issue could be mitigated by scoping the cookies to the second-level domains rather than the hostnames. That would solve www.permonks.tld vs. perlmonks.tld as I discussed with jdporter last week in the CB. It wouldn't help any with the fact that perlmonks.org, perlmonks.net and perlmonks.com are all the same site, though. The shortcuts handle that just fine.