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by 65536 2165 days ago
> This article talks about formatting and other superficial stylistic issues.

On that note though, there is one thing that people have been doing for the past 5 or so years, maybe a bit more, with the formatting when they write online. In particular I see it often on Medium.com

They use blockquote to highlight some piece of their text. But the text in the blockquote is not a quote. Neither from elsewhere nor from their own text.

This annoys me.

AFAIK, blockquote has a history in the printed press of being used to catch your eye when you flick through a newspaper, so that you would want to buy the paper and read the article on that page. And the text in the blockquote was extracted from the text itself. Often from a part of it where a person that was interviewed said something that the editors found interesting. At least, that’s how I remember it.

Another type of use it is suitable for is to distinguish something quoted from elsewhere from the rest of the text.

But the way that it is being used now, it confuses and annoys my brain every time.

2 comments

You're thinking of pull quotes, which can be confusingly similar to block quotes but are a different thing:

> It seems that many people (myself included) confuse blockquotes and pull quotes.

> The main purpose of a blockquote is to separate a large section of text — quoted from an outside source — that is relevant to the source material at hand.

> A pull quote is a section of the article pulled out of its context and repeated to give either emphasis, or to aid the reader in scanning the article.[0]

Unfortunately HTML doesn't provide a pull quote element so you have to make do with applying some CSS to a <blockquote>, or <p>, or whatever to get the desired visual effect.

[0]: https://www.studiopress.com/how-to-use-block-quotes/

I think a pull-quote might be one of the intended uses of <aside>.

(Though really, I don’t think HTML “likes“ pull-quotes — they’re a denormalization of the information conveyed by the markup. The ideal from WHATWG’s perspective would likely be some sort of intra-document transclusion reference, such that the pull-quote could “sample” the text out of where it already is on the page, without mirroring it.)

I'll add to that the writers who bold many words throughout the article.