Block quotations
Block quotation or blockquote, by definition, is a citation usually inserted as a separate segment of text, rather than inline text with quotation marks around it. A blockquote is left-indented with respect to the enclosing text and has whitespace before and after it.
Quotations provide that necessary salutation, proof of concept, sometimes vindication and if nothing else, a different point of view to your writings, thereby making a written material all the more interesting.
Whether you are a seasoned writer or a beginner to the world of writing, understanding the power of simple elements helps you in keeping up with better practices, maintain purity of content (semantics) and better exposure to search engine spiders.
In offline content — such as in print documents, reports, essays, et al — block quotes are mere paragraphs of indented text. But on the web, they not only have the ability to provide attribution to the original source, but also point to it, if it exists online.
I find that quite amazing. And it is with this reason that—when I started blogging—I began using blockquotes in my writings. I used the cite="" option almost consistently, not knowing how it would really help show-up in my posts. In order to provide a link, I used to manually add a link either at the bottom or at the beginning of the quote with necessary attribution to the source.
An example of a typical block quotation in use:
<blockquote cite="http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/2369" title="Mahatma Gandhi">Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.</blockquote>
When viewed on the web, it would look like:
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
When people fail to see the importance of child elements (e.g., cite, title) within, they tend to ignore them, even if it is semantically the right way to do. Because it doesn’t show-up anywhere on the site except in the source of the webpage.
In order not to make their efforts wasted, a couple of guys (Simon Willison, Dunstan Orchard) thought it would be worth it if they could somehow bring those elements in full display, and make them usable, without duplicating their place holder contents manually. And they did.
Dunstan improvised on Simon’s blockquote script that could extract the details of a blockquote to list below the quoted text in a couple of ways. That script is here (view source of this page).
So cool! Now, you could make your blockquotes extract out the attribution details provided, and watch a script present it below your quotes. No more is the need to put another title and/or a link below your quotes manually. Now the same code would look like:
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
A WordPress plugin: The script was fine (in fact excellent), but I had to manually add the header script call to all the themes. So I thought, why not pack it into a WordPress plugin. And there you have it:
Download: Extract Blockquote Info plugin for WordPress.
Install and use: Just extract the contents (two files actually) and upload to your WordPress plugin folder (wp-content/plugins/). Go to Plugins page and activate “Extract Blockquote Info” plugin. That’s all!
FAQ:
- You might want to see Dunstan’s Demo page on how it works.
- This plugin does not alter your content or database. It only displays the additional info from your blockquote markup (like if you have cite and title filled-up in your blockquote).
- If the plugin is deactivated, then you will not see the attribution below the quotation.
Styling: You can style your blockquote in anyway you like. You can also style the attribution differently, if you like. The CSS class used for attribution is .source. So, if you want the attribution to be in italics and right aligned, add this to your style.css:
.source { text-style: italic; text-align: right; }
Note: Some WordPress themes make use of this technique within their code (not as a plugin), so this plugin may duplicate the calls. If you’d prefer to use the theme than the plugin, then it is best to deactivate this plugin.
If you use the rich text editor within WordPress, then you’ll need to add the additional info (cite, title) by clicking on the HTML toolbar and update the markup.
Just what I was looking for my bookshelf site…
Mar 17, 06 at 18:40Jax: Enjoy
Mar 18, 06 at 16:40