Re: LYNX-DEV blockquote behavior

[Foteos Macrides]

Al Gilman <address@hidden> wrote:
>  Subject: LYNX-DEV blockquote behavior
>
>  In a discussion about HTML in Usenet, someone was saying that
>  <BLOCKQUOTE>..</BLOCKQUOTE> is ideally suited for quoting
>  attributed text. Then that person wondered aloud what browsers
>  which do not indent blockquotes would do with a nested
>  blockquote.
>  
>  I had to verify that was legal with a validator before I would
>  accept it. WebTech's says it is good 2.0 so I guess it is.
>  Anyway, I decided to see what lynx would do with it:
>  
>[...]
>  That was rendered as:
>  
>      foo bar baz
>  
>  Anybody care to explain or defend that formatting?
>  
>[Al Gilman here:]
>
>explain (just my guess):
>
>Lynx probably regards <BLOCKQUOTE> as a text style comparable to
><b> or <STRONG> and not a structure formant.  What you see here
>is the ignoring of redundant <STYLE_ON> and <STYLE_OFF> tags.
>Only the first of the two <BLOCKQUOTE>s and </BLOCKQUOTE>s has
>any effect (per this guess I am constructing).
>
>defend:
>
>Saying that nested <BLOCKQUOTES> is legal by the DTD is not the
>same as saying it is a reasonable writing style by any stretch of
>the imagingation.  And since the relevant parts of Lynx may well
>have been in place before Lynx was converted to any version of
>HTML, it is not surprising if Lou took the above view of the tag.

        Lynx has always supported BLOCKQUOTE as a block level element,
as in all DTDs, not as character level markup.  As of v2.5, Lynx also
supports BQ as a synonym for BLOCKQUOTE.  The HTML/3.0 draft sought
to replace BLOCKQUOTE with the shorter BQ, but none of the commercial
browsers paid attention to HTML/3.0.

        Lynx's style for that block is one blank line above, one blank
line below, and greater than normal left and right margins.  However,
Lynx does not support nested BLOCKQUOTE or BQ elements.

                                Fote

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