Whoops, meant to send this to www-talk for fun too: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sean B. Palmer <s...@miscoranda.com> Date: Sat, May 2, 2009 at 5:06 PM Subject: Questions on the Origin of BLOCKQUOTE To: Dan Connolly <conno...@w3.org> Cc: www-html <www-h...@w3.org>
Hi Dan, I'm investigating why BLOCKQUOTE was introduced to HTML. The two earliest mentions of the element occur in a message and a document by you: (1) “I'm trying to keep up with all sorts of HTML ideas. Some things can be added to html.dtd without significant changes to W3 code (like adding a BLOCKQUOTE tag for a new paragraph style). But for things that will require changes to the architecture, I'm developing a separate DTD from the descriptive html.dtd.” — http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1992NovDec/0159 Re: The spec evolves... Dan Connolly (conno...@pixel.convex.com) Fri, 04 Dec 92 18:07:49 CST (2) <!ENTITY % bodyelement "P | A | %heading | %list | DL | HEADERS | ADDRESS | PRE | BLOCKQUOTE | %literal"> — http://suika.fam.cx/gate/cvs/*checkout*/test/html.dtd?rev=1.3 Document Type Definition for the HyperText Markup Language as used by the World Wide Web application (HTML DTD). $Id: html.dtd,v 1.3 1993/01/07 00:38:36 connolly Exp $ Revision 1.2 of html.dtd dates to 1.2 1992/12/03, the day before the message just quoted at (1), where it seems that you were trying to keep up with suggestions for changes to HTML, and that BLOCKQUOTE was one of those suggestions. On 7th January 1993, you checked in the new html.dtd with BLOCKQUOTE included (2). Neither of these mentions, however, reveal who suggested BLOCKQUOTE and why. Was there any discussion surrounding its inclusion? What did TimBL and others think of it? And how fast was W3 code updated? Why was BLOCKQUOTE included whereas, perhaps, other suggestions fell by the wayside? What I'm trying to understand is how BLOCKQUOTE came to be included, partially in order to better understand why and how it should be used now. For example, one could easily have eschewed BLOCKQUOTE in favour of usual typographical conventions: <p>“First quoted paragraph.</p> <p>“Second quoted paragraph.”</p> An argument against this now is that BLOCKQUOTE gives you independence of styling. Independence of styling was, however, not an option in late 1992 when CSS was yet to be invented. Indeed, there are even potential signs that BLOCKQUOTE did not win favour with users very early on. In May 1993, Dave Raggett was asking whether people were actually using the element: “I am drafting an extended verion of the HTML standard and would like to know if anyone is using the <BLOCKQUOTE> element for quoted paragraphs. This element has a name greater than 8 characters which could cause problems with some SGML parsers.” — http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q2/0269.html He suggested renaming it to QUOTE, and after apparently receiving no reply on www-talk he actually called it BQ in HTML 3: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/blockquotes.html But then in HTML 3.2 it was back to BLOCKQUOTE, perhaps because by this point there was an established user base and the SGML 8 character problem had either been fixed, a workaround found, or was deemed irrelevent: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#bq My suspicion is that BLOCKQUOTE follows the pattern of other early elements, which try to introduce some level of independence from style, giving a few suggestions as to how user agents may render it, whilst still trying to provide a kind of reasonably well understood meaning. Consider, for example, what HTML 2 says about BLOCKQUOTE: “A typical rendering might be a slight extra left and right indent, and/or italic font. The BLOCKQUOTE typically provides space above and below the quote. “Single-font rendition may reflect the quotation style of Internet mail by putting a vertical line of graphic characters, such as the greater than symbol (>), in the left margin.” — http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_5.html#SEC5.5.4 Indentation was perhaps not available using any other element, but <I> and <EM> were added to html.dtd v.1.2 along with BLOCKQUOTE, so those at least could have been used instead for one of the suggested renderings. The meaning of the element and the diversity of possible stylings seems quite likely to have been important at that stage. This original prominent approach to element design seems to have fallen by the wayside due to consensus of styling amongst user agents narrowing the diversity with which an element is styled. So with BLOCKQUOTE, it came to be associated in authors' minds with indentation rather than its meaning as an extended quotation: by HTML 4.01, there is a warning in the specification that people are using it merely for indentational formatting with non-quotation semantics. At any rate, much of this research is speculation, filling in the dots between a few scant references in the record. Even if the dots are filled in correctly, there may be extra rationale that I've missed. I was hoping therefore that you might be able to piece together some more information given your clearly very central involvement in the subject. Kindest regards, -- Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/
