Dialog Manual: (link) vs. debugger

From what I can tell, in the Dialog debugger, use of (link) results in output inside angle brackets:

You can <[eat food] eat the food>

I think this is intentional, so that (manual) testing can verify what has links and, when the link text varies from the link label, what they both are.

This is fine, and I actually like it for the skein.

But it isn’t documented, and it should be.

Also, for some reason, the standard library puts conditionals around the links for many of the things it might link. I’m not sure what the reasoning is.

Also: did Linus generate the documentation from some other source, or just manually maintain all the HTML?

I have some significant experience leveraging https://antora.org/ to build documentation web sites; antora is very good at managing multiple versions of the same site, so you can have versioned docs synced to versioned code.

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Seems like an easy addition.

The idea is, the library should only put links in room descriptions and such if the author is also doing so. Otherwise it’ll give a misleading impression (e.g. everything listed in “you can also see” paragraphs will be linked, but things in the description itself won’t be).

By default, library-generated messages never contain hyperlinks. The behaviour of the library should be consistent with the rest of the story, and whether or not to sprinkle room descriptions with clickable links is a decision best left to the author.

To enable clickable links in disambiguation messages, the game over menu, default appearances, and queries to (a $) and (A $), add the following rule definition to the source code:

(library links enabled)

I’m pretty sure it’s automatically generated (e.g. the copiable code blocks are all numbered sequentially, and this numbering is always updated when new blocks are added), but the source used is not available.

Ok, so the intent is that a game could have links (just by using (link)) without all the things that could be links in the standard library also being output as links.

Yep! Perhaps you want an automap with links, for example, but don’t want objects in room descriptions linked.