Weblinks have Templates? And an Alias?

This has been irking me. Why do weblinks have templates and an alias? That seems strange. Is there a way to use those fields somehow? Is a weblink template every called into action?

Confused...

The alias works the same but for template it doesnt matter...

//But weblinks can be used for regular docs as well so maybe template can be used after all! This is useful if you want a blog post from blog container show up
in a wayfinder menu.

and they can have children, too!
I’m working on a site structure where the main News section, for example, has three subsections. So when you select News in the global navigation, you get General News, Reports and Issues in a sub-menu. The General News is in a fact a weblink to the higher-level News page, so all the news sections are at one level. The weblink document is the parent for the main news items generated by a modified NewsPublisher snippet. Its own parent, and target of its link, contains a Ditto call naming it as the parent for the items to display.
The weblink has access to TVs thanks to its template - maybe this could come in useful?
Does it help to view a weblink as a document with all the normal document features, except that a hyperlink replaces the content field? (It looks that way to me in the database).
KP

Weblinks have templates because many users requested to be able to use template variables with weblinks. I think that originally the did not have templates.

As for the alias. Not sure.

As Keith Penton stated, weblinks are just documents but with a different type attribute. So all the document fields are available, so why not use them?

As for the alias. Not sure.

I can use alias for my weblinks with FURL installed.

Ah... Template Variables. yes, that does explain the templates. Children I hadn’t considered... (boy that sounds funny out of context). But makes sense. Yes, I wanted to store some different information about each weblink as I work on a MODx port of the LinkMachine software, and I was needing some fields to store info in... the target of the link goes into the content field, but everything else is more or less open.