Stiki is a special kind of HTML generator. It integrates with a web server (httpd) and a little configuration tweak to appear to display files that have no extension (.*). The files are always displayed as HTML in the browser using the "text/html" MIME type.
This system is a clone (to some degree) of another system called Wiki Web. It is the 'mother system' of a wide variety of other systems. It has some features that Stiki does not have yet, but that may change over time. Check it out at: WikiWeb.
Wiki supports a wide variety of discussions that folks from around the web contribute to. It's worth a look, just for fun. Stiki is more for a writer who wants to publish to HTML. See DevelopmentOfStiki for upcoming features.
The primary motivation for Stiki is to provide a hypertext style for content that is not very linear and has many cross-references. Hence the following convention: Stiki finds words that appear as a "CapitalizedWord" (capitalized words stuck together), and adds HTML anchors to them dynamically. So if you create a "StikiWord", if the file exists, then a hyperlink will be created automatically that takes you to that page. If the page does not exist, it will present a '?' at the front of the word which is a link that takes you to an editing form for that page. This makes everything simple for quickly adding references to other pages, and clusters of pages can describe ideas that relate to each other.
Many features are in Stiki that make the creation of HTML easier and more flexible. A general list includes:
For a more complete technical description of the formatting rules, look at the GoodStyle page. StikiFeatureSet and DevelopmentOfStiki also have more details.