New rule CORE:S:0056 broken-markdown-link

[cleverhoods]

Mechanical rule on freeform markdown files. Discovers [text](path) + [ref]: path link targets in each file, validates each resolves relative to the source file's directory.

Skips URLs, mailto:, absolute paths, anchor-only refs (#frag).

Severity high — broken links are functional context gaps (referenced content silently fails to load), not stylistic warnings. Sibling shape to CORE:S:0024 import-targets-resolve (which handles @ imports).

Code-span aware: [text](path) inside backticks is documentation, not a real link. Fenced code blocks and inline code spans are stripped before extraction so a CHANGELOG entry describing link syntax doesn't false-positive.

The mechanical-check engine now threads annotations between chained checks in the rule's discover → validate pipeline, closing a latent gap where the validate stage always saw an empty annotations dict and silently passed.

Try ails check on a repo with .claude/rules/*.md files containing relative references between rules.

[cleverhoods]

Shipped in v0.5.10.

CORE:S:0056 broken-markdown-link is a mechanical rule on freeform markdown files. It discovers [text](path) + [ref]: path references, validates each resolves relative to the source file's directory, and skips URLs, mailto:, absolute paths, and anchor-only refs. Severity high — broken links are functional context gaps, not stylistic warnings. Sibling shape to CORE:S:0024 import-targets-resolve.

Code-span aware: fenced code blocks and inline code spans are stripped before extraction so a CHANGELOG describing link syntax inside backticks doesn't false-positive. The mechanical-check engine now threads annotations between chained checks in a rule's discover → validate pipeline, closing a latent gap where the validate stage saw an empty annotations dict and silently passed.