Thanks for the responses. I have more requirements than I told in my initial post, but I wanted to keep my explanation as simple as possible. Let me say a little more about why using DEVONthink’s wikilink features and exporting as website doesn’t fit my requirements.
I’m familiar with all of the technical details you mentioned, and let me clarify that when I say the linked formatted notes open as a read-only or uneditable HTML files, I only mean that they open in DEVONthink in a way that does not permit normal WYSIWYG editing of formatted notes. They are all editable with normal WYSIWYG editing of formatted notes when opened directly from the list view, but not when clicking from one to another using the relative links that I described. I don’t mean that they are “read only” at the system level (they are not) or that they can’t be edited in other apps (they can be, and as you have correctly concluded, that’s how I am adding the inter-note links).
My other requirement is that all of my formatted notes are in an external folder that I plan to be version controlled with Git. This external folder is on an external drive. This external drive will be shared between multiple computers (mainly two computers), only one of which can run DEVONthink. I fear that using DEVONthink’s URL scheme and exporting as website would not work with the version control system. It would also be extra work (since I don’t always know when I will need to have my external drive with me, I would end up having to export as website constantly), and editable formatted notes should just open as editable formatted notes.
But there’s one other reason why I am doing things this way: I am trying to migrate from Journler to DEVONthink. (If you are really interested, there is more backstory in another thread.) So guess where those 500 formatted notes in my external folder came from? Not from DEVONthink, since I’ve only been experimenting with DEVONthink for a few days. No, those files were exported from Journler via the Cocoa text system’s HTML writer. I (correctly) deduced that by using BBEdit to batch insert the requisite meta tag into all the HTML files before indexing them in DEVONthink, they would be indexed as formatted notes. Now I am reinserting all the inter-note links that were stripped out when I exported the files from Journler. (A side note: Although DEVONthink lacks a few of Journler’s features, in most other ways DEVONthink is a big improvement over Journler.)
This bug is not necessarily a dealbreaker in my migration away from Journler, but it surprises me.