Syntax reference

Every markdown form webolator understands. Standard markdown gets a quick summary, and the special forms are shown with their source and how they render on this page.

Standard markdown

Everything in GitHub-flavored markdown works as expected: headings, bold, italic, strikethrough, inline code, lists, - [x] task lists, tables (with :---: alignment), block quotes, footnotes¹, images, horizontal rules, and autolinks for bare https://… and www.… URLs.

Raw HTML such as <details>, <kbd>, <sup> and <img width=…> is passed through as is, and its href and src attributes are rewritten like markdown links.

A few details specific to webolator:

• The first # heading is the page title.
• Every heading gets a GitHub-style anchor id, so ## Step two becomes #step-two.
• ## and ### headings fill the "On this page" sidebar.
• Clicking an image zooms it.
• Images are inlined in --single output.

Emoji

Shortcodes use GitHub's names: :rocket: :tada: :+1: becomes 🚀 🎉 👍. A shortcode that isn't recognized is left as typed.

Links

For example, [[Usage#Ordering]] renders as Usage#Ordering. See Links for how each form is rewritten and Wikilinks for how names are matched.

Alerts

GitHub-style callouts, in five types:

Code blocks

```python
print("hello")
```

print("hello")

The word after the fence can be a language name or a file extension. It's case-insensitive, so python, py, Rust and rs all work. These languages are highlighted:

ActionScript, AppleScript, ASP, Batch (bat, cmd), BibTeX, Bash (bash, sh, zsh), C, C#, C++, Clojure, CSS, D, Diff (diff, patch), Erlang, Go, Graphviz (dot), Groovy, Haskell, HTML, Java, Java properties, JavaScript (js), JSON, LaTeX (tex), Lisp, Lua, Makefile, Markdown, MATLAB, Objective-C, OCaml, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python (py), R, reStructuredText, Ruby, Rust (rs), Scala, SQL, Tcl, Textile, XML, YAML (yml).

Anything else, including TypeScript, TOML, Dockerfile, Kotlin and Swift, is shown as plain text. Every code block gets a copy button.

Diagrams

A ```mermaid block is drawn with Mermaid: flowcharts, sequence, class, state and ER diagrams, Gantt charts and more.

```mermaid
flowchart LR
  A --> B
```

flowchart LR
  A --> B

Math

\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{n^2} = \frac{\pi^2}{6}

\begin{aligned}
f(x) &= (x + 1)^2 \\
     &= x^2 + 2x + 1
\end{aligned}

Math is rendered with KaTeX. As on GitHub, a $ followed by a digit doesn't close math, so "costs $5 and $10" stays plain text.

Front matter

An optional block at the very top of a file:

---
title: Shown in the sidebar and browser tab
order: 3
hidden: true
---

These are the only fields, and any others are ignored. See Front matter. This page uses it (title and order: 3) to sit between Links and the features folder.

Special file names

To show a folder as a plain file list instead, see --files.

Last updated 2026-09-27 · Edit this page