<BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE>

Display text as quoted

Element to identify a section of text quoted from another source.

        <html>
        <head>
        <title>Some Title</title>
        </head>
        <body>
            .
            .
==>>    <BLOCKQUOTE>A qoute from some book or something.</BLOCKQUOTE>
            .
            .
        </body>
        </html>

In the few browsers I've used the quoted material is indented on the left and sometimes the right. I'm guilty of using this element to try to narrow the margins on my text intensive pages. A couple of "BLOCKQUOTE's" around a piece of text will make some nice white space. The purists are really rolling their eyes at this but you have to do what you have to do.

The specification mentions that the text may be displayed with an italic font or even like the quoted material in some mail messages with the ">" as the leftmost character. I guess that means you shouldn't count on it working to produce spacing.

HTML 3.0 Draft

The proposed implementation shortens the element name to BQ which is really nice considering how many times I misspell the current element. It will also allow you to put in a CREDIT element to show the source of the quote.

Attributes common to almost all of the block style tags include CLEAR and NOWRAP. These attributes will be very useful when they are fully implemented by the browser developers.

CLEAR: Used to specify the vertical positioning of a block element. This lets you start a block below a figure or table, or next to it if there is a certain amount of space for your text. You can specify left, right or all to indicate that you want the left margin, right margin or both margins clear before you start displaying your text.
Instead of clearing the margins you can also tell the browser that if there is a certain amount of space next to a table or figure then it can display your text. You do this by putting in an amount of space in "en" units or in pixels. You would put a value such as "50 en" for 50 "en" spaces or "130 pixels" for 130 pixels.
NOWRAP: Used to tell the browser to not do automatic line breaks. This means your text displays on one long line unless you put in explicit line breaks using the <BR> tag.
An example of these attributes in use is:: <BQ CLEAR="50 pixels" NOWRAP>A block of quoted text.</BQ>

Attributes common to almost all of the tags permitted in the document body include ID, LANG and CLASS. You probably won't be using any of these tags for a while but I've included them so you know they are coming.

ID: A name to be used as a target for links or for naming particular elements in a style sheet. These take the place of the HTML 2.0 <A NAME="somename">Some Name</A> construct that defines internal document links.
LANG: An ISO standard language abbreviation that defines language specific elements to be used.
CLASS: Used to assign a class name to a tag.
An example of these attributes in use is:: <BQ ID="topicone" LANG="en-US" CLASS=section>A block of quoted text.</BQ>

Netscape

Nothing special.

Microsoft IE

Nothing special.

Internationalization

Adds the DIR and ALIGN attributes.

The Rusk Family . . . "the Legend Continues"

Michael T. Rusk
Comments to author: mrusk@radix.net