How to handle blockquotes?
/I'm trying to decide how to handle blockquotes. If you've got an opinion, express it below. Here's the deal, in valid XHTML a blockquote tag has to include a block-level element, such as a p tag. That looks like this:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love
Okay, that looks good in RSS, but doesn't quite pop when viewing this page in a web browser. So what if instead of using the blockquote tag, we just wrap it all in a div with some fancy formatting defined in our cascading style sheet, like this:
-Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
Now that looks good in a web browser, but is hard to see in an RSS aggregator. So, what if we combine the two? It's a bit silly, but it should do the trick for both sets of readers:
There is an old picture of a people traveling by sleigh through deep woods--pursued by wolves. Every now and then they grab one of their number and toss him to the wolves. That's conscription even if you call it selective service and pretty it up with USOs and veterans' benefits--it's tossing a minority to the wolves while the rest go on with that single-minded pursuit of the three-car garage, the swimming pool, and the safe & secure retirement benefits.
-Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road
Okay, it's a little silly to need to use three tags to mark up one paragraph of text, but fortunately, MarsEdit lets me define a custom tag to do just that, so all I have to do is highlight the paragraph I want to mark as a blockquote, and invoke the custom tag. Cool, eh? The post winds up a little too indented, since the CSS code is bumping the margins in too, but it's probably good enough for government work.