Archæology: Blockquote within paragraph

Given a markup language akin to HTML which allows the paragraph element to have the blockquote element as a child, I don’t believe that the difficulties of styling the span of text post-blockquote need be as great as it apparently is. Only in braindead web browsers do tags tell the typesetting program to do things. CSS selectors don’t work exactly like that either.

Just as a decent HTML renderer knows to continue to apply the formatting rules for a paragraph’s content following an inline element, so it could do the same when it follows a block level element. You can see this effect now by setting a CSS rule of display: block; for an inline element and including such an element in a paragraph. For example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>Test of display: block and formatting</title>
    <style type="text/css">
    em { display: block; }
    p { text-indent: 2em; }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
  <p>A paragraph, with enough text to have it wrap onto other
lines so that the indent can be noticed. Actually, I need a bit
more text for my screen width. This should now suffice for most
people. So, here’s some text in a block with some
<em>emphasised text</em> which is styled as a
block.</p>

  <p>Another paragraph, with enough text to have it wrap
onto other lines so that the indent can be noticed. Actually, I
need a bit more text for my screen width. This should now
suffice for most people.</p> 

  </body>
</html>

The above should display on screen with the text “which is styled as a block.” of the first paragraph displayed without an indent, without any work-arounds or painful setup required of the author.

Comments

Yup, this is true, and it does take care of the vertical-space and indentation problems. If, however, you want to do anything *else* to that span of text, you're out o' luck as best I can tell.

Won't come up much, fortunately. So life isn't *too* horrible. :)

Posted by: Dorothea Salo on May 18, 2003 10:13+12:00

And sadly the CSS3 Selectors Candidate Recommendation at http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/CR-css3-selectors-20011113/ doesn't provide a selector for this. I couldn’t find any discussion of it on the www-style mailing list archive at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/ — which isn’t to say there wasn’t one.

It’s also unfortunate that there isn’t a selector for an element which contains another element has a descendant.

Posted by: Jamie on May 18, 2003 17:34+12:00