Improper use of blockquotes

Posted on April 28, 2006 by Karl Dawson

After hearing that 37 Signals have released a new jobs portal, I noted a London design agency had a vacancy so I followed the link out of idle curiosity. Further random link-clicking found me at the portfolio page and onwards again to the website for Dr. Ian Gibson MP.

Bearing in mind that Checkpoint 3.7 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines states:

Mark up quotations. Do not use quotation markup for formatting effects such as indentation.

Marvel at this code snippet:

<blockquote><blockquote>&nbsp;</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<div id="center">
  <blockquote>
    <blockquote>
      <blockquote>
        <blockquote>
          <blockquote>
            <blockquote>
              <blockquote>
                <blockquote>
                  <blockquote>
                    <blockquote>
                      <p>&nbsp;</p>
                    </blockquote>
                  </blockquote>
                </blockquote>
              </blockquote>
            </blockquote>
          </blockquote>
        </blockquote>
      </blockquote>
    </blockquote>
  </blockquote>
  <div class="image_left" id="wrapper">

It’s somewhat ironic that a British MP has commissioned a website that fails to meet web standards and accessibility guidelines with all the documentation and guidance offered to government departments from the Cabinet Office.

To me, this perfectly highlights the need to raise awareness of the recently-released PAS 78 Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites. Given a week, Google will display this article alongside the website in question in a search for Dr. Ian Gibson MP so I shall wait and see whether I get any comment on the professional markup.

Update: This markup was corrected within 2 weeks (the next time I visited) so although you’ll find some user-generated tables for layout it’s not all doom and gloom. Apologies for not getting this update out in a timely manner—as teacher used to say: “could do better.”

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2 Responses to Improper use of blockquotes

  1. Dan says:
    April 28, 2006 at 2:01 pm

    Eek, truly horrible markup, unsurprisingly producing a truly broken layout. To be fair it does get better once you’re inside.

  2. Mike Cherim says:
    April 28, 2006 at 5:48 pm

    Why, oh why, oh why, do people do stuff like that?! With CSS you can make anything look like anything else — it’s pretty much without limits. With such a powerful, flexible tool, it’s hard to imagine why stuff like this is done. Obviously whoever did that is seriously lacking in the fundementals of styling elements.

    Thanks for writing this up Karl. It is painfully obvious that articles like this are still needed and will likely be for quite some time.