Template Snippet
From DocDataFlow
Snippets
A snippet is a template file. It is a text file with a .snippet file name extension.
Inside the template file, there is a mix of boilerplate text and placeholders. An example: there could be a template maindoc.xhtml.snippet which could contain
<html> $$HEAD$$ $$BODY$$ </html>
The $$HEAD$$ and $$BODY$$ would be placeholders which will be replaced by the text for some lower-level granules.
This is only a sample: placeholders can take many shapes and forms, and the use of $$ as prefix/suffix is just what's used as the default placeholder pattern in Crawler.