BLOCKQUOTE: Are you really quoting someone?

As XHTML becomes more and more prevalent, and web developers adhere to W3C guidelines to migrate to XHTML as the compliant, standardized source-code which should be used in web sites to promote accessibility, we must be aware of the elements we use in our markup.

Let’s take a look at <BLOCKQUOTE> for example. As stated in the W3C HTML 4.01 Recommendation, in the section on Paragraphs, Lines, and Phrases:

We recommend that style sheet implementations provide a mechanism for inserting quotation marks before and after a quotation delimited by BLOCKQUOTE in a manner appropriate to the current language context and the degree of nesting of quotations.

However, as some authors have used BLOCKQUOTE merely as a mechanism to indent text, in order to preserve the intention of the authors, user agents should not insert quotation marks in the default style.

The usage of BLOCKQUOTE to indent text is deprecated in favor of style sheets.

Paying special attention to the very last line, we learn that the World Wide Web Consortium would rather DEPRECATE the BLOCKQUOTE than to have it used simply for the purpose of indenting text.

So, unless you’re specifically quoting someone or something, you should use CSS to control the positioning of text in the layout of the page, NOT special HTML elements such as BLOCKQUOTE.