"Rowan Collins" <rowan.collins(a)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
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]