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Add Style to Your Blockquotes

By Stephen Bucaro

You have probably seen webpages that display a quote from the article, but taken out of the flow of the article text. This is a page design technique borrowed from printed magazines, and if done properly it can make your article look more professional. One important thing a blockquote does is break up the monotony of paragraphs of text on a webpage, and that's important for viewer eye relief.

Note that the blockquote is an html "block" level element, which means it contains an embedded carriage return immediately before the opening <blockquote> tag and immediately after the closing </blockquote> tag. The blockquote is unique because unlike other block level elements, it places some margin before and after the blockquote, in other words, the blockquote will be displayed narrower than paragraphs in the same column.

A basic blockquote is a bit boring

A basic blockquote is a bit boring, but there are a few style tricks that you can use to spice them up. The method of applying style that I will use for these examples is called "inline style" because the style rules are defined in a style attribute within the blockquote's opening tag. This is a very easy way to apply style, but not the most efficient.

If you have multiple blockquote's to which you want to apply the same style, you could define a style class within a style code block in the <head> section of your webpage, or in a separate file linked to each webpage.

A basic blockquote is a bit boring, but there are a few style tricks that we can use to spice them up.

In the blockquote shown above, I used style to display a border around the blockquote. I set the border property to a double border with a blue color and 3 pixels wide. There are many different styles of borders you can set, including solid, groove, and ridge.

A basic blockquote is a bit boring, but there are a few style tricks that we can use to spice them up.

You can set a different style for each border. In the blockquote shown above, I set border width to 1 pixel, then I overwrote the bottom border width to 4 pixels. If you add a border, you'll also need to specify some padding between the border and the text.

The html blockquote element is easy to use and can be used break up the monotony of paragraphs of text and give your webpage a more professional look.

In the blockquote shown above, I used style to set the font to Courier with a font size of 14 pixels and a green color. Of course you could set the font AND add a border.