XWiki - XWiki Syntax Guide 

Page / - last modified by superadmin on 2025/10/28 13:17 

XWiki Syntax Guide 
last modified by superadmin
on 2025/10/28 13:17

Table of Contents
XWiki Syntax 2.1: General

  
XWiki Syntax 2.1 » General
XWiki Syntax 2.1: General
•	General
•	Introduction
•	General Remarks
•	Other Syntaxes
•	Editing
•	Paragraphs
•	Headings
•	Text Formatting
•	Horizontal Line
•	Lists
•	Definition Lists
•	New Line/Line Breaks
•	Links
•	Tables
•	Images
•	Advanced
•	Verbatim
•	Quotations
•	Groups
•	Escapes
•	Parameters
•	Programming
•	Macros
•	HTML
•	Scripts

Introduction
2.1 Introduction
The XWiki Syntax 2.0 has proven to be quite useful and robust in general; however since its introduction a few shortcomings have been found. The corresponding improvements have been consolidated in XWiki Syntax 2.1. Some new features of this syntax are:
•	Homogenize the link and image syntax for better clarity, consistency and extensibility.
•	Added ability to display icons, to embed images via the Data URI scheme, 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
Other syntaxes are also available (bundled or through extensions):
•	JSPWiki (Bundled)
•	MediaWiki (Extension)
•	Confluence (Bundled)
•	TWiki (Bundled)
•	Creole 1.0 (Bundled)
•	XHTML 1.0 (Bundled)
•	Markdown (Extension)
•	DokuWiki (Extension)