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A bit ago I read the Comment Formatting section in the Markdown help and actually used some shorthand links in a comment. At the time I just assumed that these shorthand links would also work when asking or answering a question even though (in hindsight) the title of the section does not imply this.

But now I have tried the shorthand links in a question/answer and they definitely do not work in that context.

I don't understand why this feature would be restricted to comments. Is this intentional? If so, why?

Here is a list of the shorthand links copied from the help section to illustrate which ones do and do not work outside of a comment.

These shorthand links do appear to work:
[tag:tagname] which formats as
[meta-tag:tagname] which also formats as (but only in a meta exchange).

These short hand links do not work:

[meta], [main], [edit], [so], [su], [sf], [metaso], [a51], [se], [chat], [ask], [answer]

[faq], [meta-faq],
[faq#anchor] (i.e. [faq#questions]),
[meta-faq#anchor] (i.e. [meta-faq#questions]

[something.se] (i.e. [ubuntu.se])

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Yes, it only works in the comments (and to an extent, in the chat as well).

Just think about why it is not allowed in the answers a little. Why would anyone want to link to the FAQs and other SE sites in their answers? It clearly doesn't have much of a use case, really. If anyone wants to link people to those things, it makes more sense for the links to be left as a comment than as an answer.

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