Tension
I trying to reduce the amount of clicks and typing for inserting an external link in the ckeditor (default xwiki 2.1 syntax). There is an xwiki ckeditor link button which allows to add title and URL, but that action costs time, clicks and typing. For researchers that continuously copy paste links to web resources, there needs to be a faster way.
Example solutions
There are chrome extensions that allow users to copy the html or markdown syntax of a page its url+ title, so that the page source source is always for example:
<a href="https://www.w3schools.com/">Visit W3Schools.com!</a>
When using a markdown editor, there are browser extensions that copy paste the markdown syntax of the page+url like
[HTML Links Hyperlinks](https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp)
which of course in the page source also appears as the html link mentioned above.
I assume that xwiki does not have such browser plugin yet which converts a page url to xwiki 2.1 syntax.
Current workarounds
I could change the syntax of a page to either html or markdown, and switch to source code view to paste such links, but that is troublesome for larger pages where there it requires searching the right location in the text, and this is not an end-user solution.
I would expect that the xwiki ckeditor would be able to recognize and convert CommonMarkdown 1.2 (I installed and enabled that extension too) or even Xwiki 2.1 syntax in the wysiwyg editor, but that does not work.
Because if its benefits, I prefer to keep pages in Xwiki 2.1 syntax. This means that if I paste for example a markdown link, the xwiki ckeditor needs to convert it to Xwiki 2.1 syntax when saving the page.
Feature request
Maybe its a good feature suggestion to allow plain URLS not only to be converted to links but that when saving the page, such unconverted URLS are looked up on the internet, and the page title and description (and possibly a thumbnail) is downloaded and displayed.
Question
So to summarize, the idea is to help users with one click paste a link that show as the title instead of plain URL, without having to use the current ckeditor link button form.