The link syntax is verbose, and there is no way to do inline links. The official page was last updated in 2009.

re: 2009 - Probably because makedoc2 isn't going to change. It's replacement (makedoc3) seems to have hibernated but it does show up in some places - http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/markup.html

re: inline links - No its not currently part of the makedoc2 spec or implementation. However inline links are present in make-doc-pro (http://www.robertmuench.ch/development/projects/mdp/) which is an implementation which includes some extensions to the makedoc2 spec.

Here's an example with inline url in make-doc-pro:

  Click on =url http://news.ycombinator.org Hacker News= to get latest tech info