> As far as compact wiki-like shortcuts versus XML, the first often has more escaping issues or confusion. It isn't an either-or, and never has been. XML has b

> As far as compact wiki-like shortcuts versus XML, the first often has more escaping issues or confusion. It isn't an either-or, and never has been. XML has been created as an SGML subset, and SGML always had short references ie. custom tokens the parser is replacing by something else in a context-dependent way. For example, an asterisk can be replaced by an <em> start-element tag to start emphasized text, and, within emphasized text, asterisks can be replaced by </em> end-element tags.