I've been adding more quotes to my blog lately, since I'm covering more news-related articles lately.

Blockquote makes the quote indented, and a smaller font than normal. It also has a blank line above and below, so in some ways it's a lot like a special paragraph. Is there a tag or a meaningful way to put the source of the quote beneath the block?

Not really, no such thing as a caption for a block quote. I would suggest just styling a <p> with a class to go where you want it and have the appearance you want.

Thanks, LNR! I couldn't think of one, but that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't one I don't know about. Glad to hear I was double-guessing myself for nothing.

It's kind of interesting, though, between table headers, and everything else they've built in to make it more semantic, I'm surprised there's no quote source. Oh well, it's a humble p to the rescue like you suggested.

It would make sense to have a tag for the quote source wouldn't it? I usually just leave the source in the blockquote and surround the source with <em> tags..

I like the idea of styling a <p> too.

John you do know you can change the look of the blockquote itself too? You can style it any way you want just like any other html element.

I've noticed a lot of blogs use css to put a giant quote image on the side of their blockquotes.

One thing that has always bugged me with the blockquote tag (or browsers really) is there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for doing anything with the cite attribute. Which would seem to be very important considering its the URL of the source of the quote.

I wrote a little DHTML effect to make it render (but, I should not have had to do so). It just makes a little tooltip displaying the title attribute and the cite attribute (as a hyperlink). The displayed URL gets clipped to make it fit the bubble.

On my html tag page you can see the effect. I stupidly left the demo off the page that shows how to do it. If you want to use it, just rip the code off of my blockquote hover page. The javascript should work if dropped into any page, and you can customize the look and feel with the CSS snippet. There is some explanation of how the code works, too. So, it should be fairly easy if you need to modify it to fit your needs.

LadynRed, please don't kill me for my silly VML IE rounded corner sham


Update: I added a demo of the concept into the blockquote hover page (I should have done it a long time ago).

Nice work Paul

Ditto Paul. It looks pretty cool to me. Cool enough that I think I'll be stealing...err...borrowing your code and modifying it a little.

I'll most likely be linking to the page and hopefully sending some people your way as well.

Thanks for all of the compliments.
Feel free to use any of the code on the site.
The whole site is based around the idea of taking my random notebooks and sharing the info (besides, I always manage to lose them anyway). The bonus for me is that in the process of sharing information, I have to organize it a little. Plus, its kind of cool when you go to a developer conference and find out some guy from IBM was able to learn something from it too.
:-)

The compliments are well deserved. And I know what you mean about the developers at IBM. Awhile back I noticed some referral traffic to one of my articles from an internal IBM page. I thought that was cool that at least one person was there was checking out something I wrote.

Sorry for getting back late, but that is COOL!! Go, Paul!