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Hang on - if nobody seems to use {{ }} then why is this what Creole chose? Why not the more standard [[ ]] notation? -- Nicolas Wu, 11 Feb 2008
Because [[ ]] is already taken for links, and it's indeed the most standard notation for them, apart from CamelCase. Using teh same markup for both just doesn't work -- some wikis treat images as normal pages, others as attachaments, you often want to have the ability to choose whether to display the image or to link to it. The {{ } markup is nicely consistent with [[ ]] and doesn't collide with most existing markups (the mediawiki templates can be resolved, I think there was a wiki using it for monospace too, but it had a lot of other strange rules). Besides, MoinMoin now uses {{ } for images and page transclusion too. -- RadomirDopieralski, 11 Feb 2008
Thanks for the answer. So taking this abstraction further, would we say that [[ ]] always takes us to another page in the wiki, or to an external link, whereas {{ }} will try to embed the content directly in to the page? For example, we might want to embed a flash video, plug in some raw text, or even directly insert the content of another wiki (as far as I know this isn't done, but I'm wondering if it might be a useful extension). -- Nicolas Wu, 12 Feb 2008
Yes, exactly. There might be some magick involved in determining the type of the linked object and "embedding" it, so it's definitely and advanced feature of any wiki engine, but the intention is there: square brackets link, curly braces embed. At least it's how I see it, but I suspect others had similar ideas when this was introduced. -- RadomirDopieralski, 13 Feb 2008