Re: LYNX-DEV blockquote behavior

[Al Gilman]

  Subject: LYNX-DEV blockquote behavior

  In a discussion about HTML in Usenet, someone was saying that
  <BLOCKQUOTE>..</BLOCKQUOTE> is ideally suited for quoting
  attributed text. Then that person wondered aloud what browsers
  which do not indent blockquotes would do with a nested
  blockquote.
  
  I had to verify that was legal with a validator before I would
  accept it. WebTech's says it is good 2.0 so I guess it is.
  Anyway, I decided to see what lynx would do with it:
  
[...]
  That was rendered as:
  
      foo bar baz
  
  Anybody care to explain or defend that formatting?
  
[Al Gilman here:]

explain (just my guess):

Lynx probably regards <BLOCKQUOTE> as a text style comparable to
<b> or <STRONG> and not a structure formant.  What you see here
is the ignoring of redundant <STYLE_ON> and <STYLE_OFF> tags.
Only the first of the two <BLOCKQUOTE>s and </BLOCKQUOTE>s has
any effect (per this guess I am constructing).

defend:

Saying that nested <BLOCKQUOTES> is legal by the DTD is not the
same as saying it is a reasonable writing style by any stretch of
the imagingation.  And since the relevant parts of Lynx may well
have been in place before Lynx was converted to any version of
HTML, it is not surprising if Lou took the above view of the tag.

--
Al Gilman
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