The conversational writing style (that developed in the early days of email and Usenet) of responding to bits of quoted text is still comfortable and useful on web boards and forums…and in the comments here on BC, since Drupal supports “threading.” Since we are allowed some HTML markup on BC, the <blockquote> tag serves the purpose nicely.
However, <blockquote> now has a style associated with it that wasn’t there before–a style which has an annoyance…and may be broken. The broken part is that paragraph breaks (with a blank line inbetween) are reduced to simple line breaks between <blockquote> tags, no matter how many <br> tags are inserted. However, placing each paragraph in its own pair of <blockquote> tags provides a reasonable workaround.
The annoyance is that all text between the <blockquote> tags is forced into italics; this becomes a problem when the text to be quoted already has italics. Substituting <strong> is too much, and substituting <u> does not have the same effect. I have tried <… style="font-style: normal"> with <blockquote>, <div>, and <span>, but apparently the style element is filtered out of tags. Is there any way to turn this behavior off so that I may specify italics where appropriate with tags?
Thanks for your help…
Known problem
We knew about this, it's a feature of the new "improved" theme for Drupal. Who knows why they changed it? It's just not been a priority to fix in the months since the upgrade. Honest, we do intend to get to it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
If, as, and when :}
Thank you, Erin, I was just hoping there was a workaround. It’s only an occasional annoyance, so…yeah, whenever… :}
Alternatives
If you want to do something like that, why not just do it the old fashioned way? Cut'n'Paste the quote and then mark it up yourself?
There's no requirement you have to use blockquote tags for quotes.
Penny
Already have to cut and paste anyway...
…and add in the markup by hand. All that <blockquote> does is change the margins on a block of text, which is the standard typographical way of telling people that the text is not original, but quoted from somewhere.
For example, this is how the above paragraph is rendered in <blockquote> tags:
I do not know a better way to indicate quoted text on BC, since the HTML tags and elements we are allowed are limited.
Spacings
If I'm using blockquote for multiple paragraphs I insert a non-breaking space (Shift-Alt-J in the editor) between the paragraphs to force a CR
Shiraz
I’ll give that a try, thank
I’ll give that a try, thank you. :}