XWiki Syntax Guide

Last modified by Thomas Mortagne on 2014/11/14 15:32

XWiki Syntax 2.1: General

Introduction

2.1 Introduction

Since the introduction of XWiki Syntax 2.0 a few shortcomings of this syntax have been found. To fix these a new, as of now experimental, XWiki Syntax 2.1 was introduced in XWiki Enterprise version 3.0. Some reason for the development of this new syntax are:

Homogenize the link and image syntax for better clarity, consistency and extensibility.
Added ability to display icons, to link to files using the UNC notation and to link to relative URLs.

Since XWiki Syntax 2.1 is based on XWiki Syntax 2.0 all syntax from XWiki Syntax 2.0 is valid unless the 2.1 specifications suggest differently.

In addition to these XWiki-specific syntaxes we've also changed our underlying rendering engine in XWiki Enterprise version 1.7 (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.

General Remarks

2.0 General Remarks

XWiki Syntax 2.1 corrects some errors or ambiguous syntax entered by the user as shown in the examples in the table below.

Description	Example of invalid or ambiguous syntax	Fixed XWiki Syntax 2.1
Unclosed text styles	**bold	bold
Two standalone elements not separated by 2 new lines	\| table cell * list item	\| table cell * list item
Two standalone elements not separated by 2 new lines	paragraph ---- paragraph	paragraph ---- paragraph
Ignored new line at beginning of document	<new line at beginning of document> paragraph	paragraph
Not closed heading syntax	=== heading	=== heading ===

Other Syntaxes

1.0 Other Syntaxes

The following other syntaxes are implemented in XWiki Enterprise 1.6 and later:

The implementation for these syntaxes is not fully finished yet. For example support for links is not working perfectly yet. We also need to define if we want to extend the original syntaxes to support XWiki-specific features like ability to link to another sub-wiki.