As much as the bugs in Blogger annoy me, the one thing they do right is to allow the user to go to source and edit the HTML. For the users that don’t understand markup, they have a WYSIWYG editor.
Reinventing a markup language is the wrong approach. I’ve been creating HTLM pages since 1994, and every time I edit a Wikipedia page I roll my eyes because I still have to look-up that URL syntax. I agree with Calvin, use REST if you want to implement “automatic cross referencing functionality” but remember, that is a server-side function, not a mark-up issue.
One recommendation, I would create a White List of HTML you will support. This way you don’t have to try to manage a Black List of restricted tags.