| Depr. | Empty | Version |
|---|---|---|
| No | No | HTML 3.2 |
| IE5.5+ | FF1+ | SA1.3+ | OP9.2+ | CH2+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial |
Syntax
Description
The blockquote element is a mechanism for
marking up a block of text quoted from a person or another document or
source. It may be just a few lines, or it may contain several paragraphs
(which you’d mark up using nested p
elements).
The W3C recommendation states that web page
authors should not type quotation marks in the text when they’re using
blockquote—we can leave it to the style sheets to take
care of this element of presentation (just as it should be when the
q element is used for short, inline
quotations). In practice, though, many authors do choose to include quote
marks, as browser support for automatically inserting the
language-appropriate quotation marks is extremely poor.
By default, most browsers’ basic built-in style sheets render
blockquote content with left and right indentations, as
shown in Figure 1. As a consequence, many
people learned to use blockquote to indent the text as
a way to draw attention to a paragraph or section of a page. Of course,
this is bad practice—it’s simply the wrong markup for the job. Only use
blockquote if you’re actually quoting a source; to
visually indent a block of text that’s not a quotation, use CSS
(margin-left, or any other style property you care to
choose).
Note that XHTML allows the
blockquote element to contain only other block-level
elements (script element is also allowed).
blockquote between two normal paragraphs
(note indentation)
Example
The example below is a quote from an as yet unidentified source who despairs about the stupidity of stock photography:
<blockquote>
<p>It's missing alt text, so it's difficult to determine what it's
supposed to mean. Presumably "oooh, there's been a global
ecological catastrophe and we’ve got the last four leaves in the
world and we've patented the DNA". Or they're rubbing ganja
leaves together to extract the resin, but are too stupid to
recognise Marijuana so are trying it with willow or silver
birch.</p>
</blockquote>
Use This For …
This element is used to mark up one or more
paragraphs, which may themselves contain other inline elements (for
example, strong, em or a elements).
Compatibility
| Internet Explorer | Firefox | Safari | Opera | Chrome | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.5 | 6.0 | 7.0 | 8.0 | 1.0 | 1.5 | 2.0 | 1.3 | 2.0 | 3.1 | 4.0 | 9.2 | 9.5 | 10.0 | 2.0 |
| Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial | Partial |
blockquote
has been around a long time, but it hasn’t aged a day. If you use it in a
situation where style sheets aren’t applied, and you’re relying only on
the browser’s default (or built-in) set of styles, the
blockquote renders almost identically across all
browsers, just as it did in some of the earliest browsers, none of which
rendered the cite attribute’s value on the
page.
The support chart shows as "partial" rather
than "full" because the browsers lack support for
indicating the source of the quote through the cite
attribute.
In this Section
- cite
provides the source of the quotation in the form of a URI
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