Primordial Ooze

Don’t ask me why I just figured this out now.

There are areas of the HTML spec that I simply haven’t covered yet. I’m not a “web” developer so I guess this is to be expected. Discovery is a daily exercise for me. However, I do like to respect standards and I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately on CSS and standards-based web design. A few months ago I read The Zen of CSS Design Visual Enlightenmenet for the Web by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag.

One of these areas of recent enlightenment is the HTML tag BLOCKQUOTE. BLOCKQUOTE is meant to be used to cite someone else’s words or to otherwise reproduce text found elsewhere. You can even add a CITE attribute with a URI to the originating source of the information. Most default browser implementations style a BLOCKQUOTE as an indentation, but this is not a guarantee. A CSS designer is free to make BLOCKQUOTE do whatever they want. Perhaps the text is instead italicized. A lot of people use BLOCKQUOTE simply for it’s indentation capabilities and are thus misusing the element.

However, as some authors have used BLOCKQUOTE merely as a mechanism to indent text, in order to preserve the intention of the authors, user agents should not insert quotation marks in the default style.

The usage of BLOCKQUOTE to indent text is deprecated in favor of style sheets.

It’s even worse when your tool misuses the element!

Once I read about BLOCKQUOTE, I wanted to see if my favorite blog posting tool supported it. I use a really good (but not perfect) tool called BlogJet((Hey, I just noticed that BlogJet automatically inserts the URL when I type it in… sneaky).

It turns out that BlogJet(grrr) uses BLOCKQUOTE when you indent text. I’ve been indenting text for years using this feature and every time I’ve thus been using BLOCKQUOTE. If you find me going back and editing all of my entries to get into conformance, you know I’ve gone off the deep end.