Ward called this "hiding the gibberish", new term for me as a non native speaker. To explain this tag to someone you could say "This is the gibberish tag" - If people see this they can safely skipp it, but instead of seeing that huge "gibberish" code that they don't understand, they just see this.

--[Christoph]

I like the word "gibberish" (or "native") far more than I like the world "Placeholder".  The word "placeholder" implies that the markup is not in [mixed mode], but rather in [creole mode].

I think we might want to invent a better name.  I suggest "WikiSpeck" - as in a "smudge".  It's also a bad non-native English speaker pun on the word "WikiSpeak"...

-- JanneJalkanen

Can you give an example of placeholder usage?

-- [MartinBudden], 2006-12-06