Blockquote tags

Mon Mar 23 08:55:44 EST 1998

-----Original Message-----
From: rjtiess at juno.com <rjtiess at juno.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Date: Monday, March 23, 1998 8:08 AM
Subject: Blockquote tags

>Lately I've been using one of the older HTML
>tags, Blockquote, to increase the legibility of
>webpages with a lot of text on them.  It's
>very easy to implement, and the end result is
>a nice left and right margin on your page.  I
>believe this tag also works with Lynx.  The
>added whitespace also gives the document
>a sense of readability, as opposed to text
>running flush margin to margin.

You're making a common but unfounded assumption.  Most of the browsers
you're familiar with display BLOCKQUOTE as though it were an indented
paragraph.  That does not mean that all browsers will do this, nor that this
is BLOCKQUOTE's purpose.

BLOCKQUOTE, as its name implies, is intended to enclose a block of quoted
text (as opposed to the HTML 4.0 Q element, which encloses an inline quote).
That's all.  One likely rendering of this is an indented paragraph, but in
other contexts the expected rendering is to place a ">" at the beginning of
each quote line, or--in a typographically rich environment--to indent a
block and also reduce its font size and line spacing.  In fact, that's how I
have my personal style sheet set, so odds are I would find your pages
somewhat *less* legible as a result.

It's also quite conceivable that some search engine, in an effort to improve
precision, would skip or reduce the relevance of words in BLOCKQUOTE--after
all, you've tagged those words as coming from some other source, so they
must not really be part of your content, right?

And to top it all off, you don't know how much of an indent you're creating.
Even among browsers that render BLOCKQUOTE the way you expect, you can't
control the size of the indent.

Some of you probably know where I'm going with this: stylesheets.  They're
the right tool for the job for two main reasons: they let you address the
structure of your document honestly--if something really is a paragraph, you
can mark it up with P--and they let you address the presentation of you
document much more flexibly than hacks like BLOCKQUOTE, nested DL's, UL's
with no LI's, etc.  They will not affect browsers that don't support them,
and with a small bit of care they won't even harm browsers which claim to
support them but only support a botched subset of the specification.

So if you're convinced you need to indent a section of your document--and
I'm not aware of anything that proves this increases legibility--I
recommend:

<html>
<head>
<title>A Title</title>
<style type="text/css"><!--
.indented {
  margin-left: 8%;
  margin-right: 8%}
--></style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="indented">
<h1>Hello</h1>
...
</div></body></html>

Thomas Dowling
Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu