"Rowan Collins" rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote in message news:9f02ca4c0512200548k7ea50e24x@mail.gmail.com...
On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 09:14:06AM -0000, Phil Boswell wrote:
...which is really annoying when the perfectly legal (and thoroughly documented) <blockquote> makes much more sense than a simple ":" indentation. Maybe we should make it a requirement that you read the Help page on legitimate markup before you're allowed to summarily revert formatting :-)
Well, I would think that reading a lone ":" as equivalent to "<blockquote>" (or something else sensible), if that could be implemented sanely, would be preferable; but I'm not sure that people sprinkling big ugly "<blockquote>...</blockquote>" blocks in the middle of wikitext is all that good an idea.
I tend towards liking "least surprise". <blockquote> is obviously for tagging a block which is quoted from somewhere. If you haven't noticed (and surprisingly many have not, no matter how long they have been on Wikipedia), <blockquote> introduces indents on **both** margins. It also allows the use of CSS styling. It is almost never needed to nest them.
The ":" syntax appears to be purely for successively indenting questions and replies in conversations: any other usage seems to be serendipitous. It is actually implemented as <dd> tags within nested <dl> containers. For those lucky enough not to have much exposure to HTML, that is actually intended for use as a "Definition List". The seldom used "; :" syntax, which produces a bold header followed by an indented paragraph, is actually the correct way to use the <dl> and <dd> tags.
Just to check, everybody does know that they are actually writing in HTML, using a rather esoteric shorthand, right? :-)
HTH HAND