Re: The Origin of Blockquote

On Mon, 2017-08-28 at 20:56 +0100, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
> This is a partial log of the IRC channel #swig on irc.freenode.net
> from 2017-08-28, with timestamps in UTC, where Dan Connolly and I
> discuss the origin of the blockquote element in HTML circa December
> 1992. This channel is normally archived and accessible to the public,
> but the logger has not been there since February 2017.

Anders Berglund's "CERN SGML" also had "block quotations"

21.1 Long Quotations

These are also referred to as block quotations, to distinguish them
from in-line quotations.  A long quotation is identified as follows:

    text before quotation
    <LQ>[start of]
    long quotation text block
    </LQ>
    text after long quotation

http://cds.cern.ch/record/997909/files/cer-002659963.pdf?version=1
p.24, October 27, 1986.

That doesn't answer why HTML has blockquote rather than lq (i'd have
been startled to find my initials in HTML though!), but for sure the
concept was already there.  I'm pretty sure Anders has mentioned to me
having shown Tim some SGML documentation at the time.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, XQuery WG

Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Monday, 28 August 2017 21:34:03 UTC