I went to the Blogger Help Center ("help" link from blogger.com pages), and followed the "Posting and Editing" link. From there (a list of questions), I linked to "How do I make a link to another page?"

I wanted to know about a list of options on a pull down menu in the link creation tool in the blogger post editor. It asks what link type we want: other, file, ftp, gopher, http, https, mailto, news, telnet, wais.

What are these? Why is it asking?

What's a better way to ask what they are?

If I select one or another of these types, does it put a different link in my code?

If I link to the same page with different link types, will the link produce different results when someone clicks it?

(If each option is just to be used to link to a specific file type, why do I need to make this selection? Isn't the file type reflected in the url for a file?)

Perhaps more importantly, these link types hint at different things I can make my links do for readers, or different kinds of content I can link to. How can I document these options?

Documentation by example seems like the thing to do. If readers could send examples of how they use different types of links, with information about how they selected that type, other readers can link to the example and see what that link type does.

I want to introduce this idea separately, but my hope is that readers will post examples in the comment section for this post.