XWiki Syntax Guide

XWiki Syntax 2.0 » General » Introduction

2.0 Introduction

Starting with XWiki 1.7 we've introduced a new wiki syntax. We've named the old syntax the XWiki Syntax 1.0 and the new syntax was logically called the XWiki Syntax 2.0. The main reasons for introducing the new syntax were:

• Fix the limitations and ambiguities of the XWiki 1.0 syntax (which was inspired by both Radeox - the underlying rendering engine - and TWiki).
  • Not optimal symbols. For example the symbol for bold was single stars. This was causing trouble when users were entering text containing stars since that text was mistakenly considered to be bold when it wasn't. Hence we've rationalized the syntax by using at least double characters everywhere. 
  • Ambiguities. For example there was an ambiguity between a bold item starting a line and a bullet list. Resolving the ambiguities was required in order to rewrite the WYSIWYG editor so that it could be deterministic.
• Be closer to the Creole 1.0 syntax which is becoming a standard for wiki syntax. In addition the Creole community has taken the time to analyze all the existing wiki syntaxes before deciding on symbols. The choices made are thus very good.

In addition to these XWiki-specific syntaxes we've also changed our underlying rendering engine (was Radeox previously) in favor of our own engine which is superset wrapper around Wikimodel and Doxia (and possibly others in the future). This has allowed us to provide other syntaxes in the wiki: MediaWiki, Confluence, JSPWiki, Creole, TWiki and more.