[whatwg] The blockquote element spec vs common quoting practices

[Jukka K. Korpela]

2012-02-12 8:36, Nils Dagsson Moskopp wrote:

>> Since in current usage, <blockquote>  means just “indent” more often
>> than not, browsers and search engines should not and will not imply
>> any specific semantics for it. Thus it will be pointless to use it.
>
> Riveting tale, chap. Can you provide proof?

Regarding browsers and search engines, what else could constitute a 
proof than the absence of any information about them doing anything with 
<blockquote>? Apart from the obvious default rendering, with indents, 
that is.

Regarding the usage, I have not collected statistics on this during my 
20 years of browsing web pages, and I don’t think anyone has. So 
objective argumentation is somewhat difficult. In this discussion, I 
mentioned the WIPO document
http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html
issued by a reputable organization, and if you look at the source code, 
you’ll see that the page uses <blockquote> just for subparagraphs, not 
for quotations. I’m sure that if you start looking around, you’ll see 
<blockquote> used mostly for mere indentation.

Yucca