Recovering the web’s unclaimed legacy of academic text standards: SGML, HTML, and the misremediation of quotation

Abstract

This study examines the trajectory of inline and block quotation over the period in which HTML has undergone standardisation, from the introduction of the blockquote element to the HTML 1.0 specification (1993) to the current HTML 5 standard. The focus of the study is the distinct difference between the web’s current quotation practices and the legacy rule for short versus longer quotations as mandated by the body of academic style guides that began to emerge from the early 20^th century. Working from a wide range of heterogeneous sources, the academic length-differentiated quotation rule is tracked from its inception, through its establishment as the academic norm in print, through its faithful remediation for digital workflows by the proximate antecedent of HTML, the leading SGML applications in text processing of the nineteen-eighties and early nineties. The consecutive hybridisation of block quotation with the text elements of the epigraph and the pullquote in the course of HTML’s standardisation process is treated as a misremediation that needlessly abandons continuity and vitiates the academic legacy’s virtues of clarity and coherence.

Keywords:

• Quotation
• citation
• bibliography
• typography
• web standards
• standardization
• HTML
• SGML
• style guides
• blockquote

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The provenance of block quotation has not previously been studied. Robert Bringhurst (2016, p. 86) asserts that block quotation simply adopted indention to replace the early modern convention of per-line quotation marks. As Houston (2013, p. 204) points out, this assertion is not supported by any evidence. The account offered below is a mere thumbnail sketch and will be supplemented by a fully documented separate study that is currently in preparation.

2 The pullquote still awaits a formal study of its provenance and history. Anecdotally, it has been suggested that Life magazine used an early form of pullquotes in the nineteen-fifties (Dobell, 1980), and that New York magazine, founded in 1968, established and popularised pullquotes in the contemporary sense (Huhn, 1993). By the early eighties pullquotes had become accepted elements of newspapers rather than magazines only (Garcia, 1981, p. 100). Pullquotes also loom large in the instructional literature on desktop publishing (e.g. Davis et al., 1986, p. 46).

3 The behaviour in which the quotation marks delimiting an HTML q element are added by the rendering agent, i.e. the browser, rather than being inserted into the document source is also prefigured in the first iteration of the General Document DTD (IBM, 1978, p. 74).

4 Blogging turned HTML’s previously obscure blockquote element into a vital part of a popular genre by adopting extracts from linked articles as a favoured practice. Posted in July 1998, the earliest web tutorial on blogging recommends that blog posts should contain extracts from linked articles. Oddly, this tutorial calls such extracts ‘pullquotes’ (Barger, 1998f), a usage that is also attested in several of the author’s contemporaneous Usenet postings about the then-nascent practice of blogging (1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 1998d, 1998e). The misnomer ‘pullquote’ for an excerpt from a linked article caught on as the term favoured by bloggers, and it went on to become a staple of the literature on blogging (e.g. Blood, 2002, pp. 60, 68; Dvorak, 2005).

5 In his previous books, Meyer neither marks up a pullquote with the blockquote element nor applies pullquote styling to a blockquote element (2000, 2002, pp. 19–21).

6 The prescription of attribution lines for longer quotations is incongruous with having a conventional citation system in the first place. The capriciousness of this incongruity becomes palpable in a book such as Richard Rutter’s (2017) Web Typography, which, thanks to recent advances in web typography, is premised on demonstrating – or advocating for – the web’s continuity with pre-web typographic practice, as it details how, in case after case, many of the finer points of Western typography are now applicable to the web as well. It is jarring, then, that this book undercuts its premise of a continuous legacy by using a perfectly conventional citation scheme, yet, in breach of this citation scheme, citing its block quotations with attribution lines that are wholly discontinuous with the citation system adopted.