How do you use the HTML blockquote tag?

How do you use <blockquote> ?

This is how I think it should be used, in combination with the <cite> element.



I don't get the point of the cite attribute though, it doesn't appear to display anywhere other than the source.

I know it's not in the best tradition of standard conformance, but I never use blockquote, and hence cite. The need has never arisen.

http://htmldog.com/reference/htmltags/blockquote/

I believe the cite is for search engines to use for the most part. That way they know where the content is originated from.

I agree with the SpooF's reply. It is used for search engines. And is not displayed else where in the page.

I know I post a lot about CSSPlay but if you look at his home page (clicky) you will see a blockquote he uses. At the end of the quote it states where the quote came from. The code he used is this:


 
This is what he uses in his CSS to make that display:
 

Blackqoute tag is supposed to contain only block-level elements within it, and not just plain text. But is there an advantage for seo on using this?

Only in the strict versions of HTML4.01 and XHTML1.0 DOCTYPEs.
For the loose AKA transitional versions, it's a little more forgiving.

HTML4.01-transitional


XHTML1.0-transitional


As you can see, character data is perfectly valid in XHTML1.0-transitional & both enable inline elements such as <cite>.


If I ever find my way onto a search engines development team, there will be.

So basically using blockquote should be for quoting things from other websites really? If I am reading this correctly ...

I wouldn't say it has to be an other website, just a different context.

For instance quoting people in forum posts. The cite attribute could point to the previous posts container element.



If a search engine was intelligent enough to understand that the <blockquote> was referring to something else on the page or to a different page, the search engine could skip the contents instead of looking at it like duplicate content.

That would make sense from a search engine point of view because one guy could have the word Baloney in it and now 10 people quote that post saying something like "yes I agree" or something like that ... now the word gets repeated 11 times on that page and it is more likely to be found by a search engine in a search for "Baloney" where it shouldn't actually be that important because the word should actually just be shown once on that page ...

The search engine could also look at it as a conversation about baloney with multiple participants & return the conversation for someone looking for conversations about baloney instead of returning baloney stores.

but then how would the search engine know you are looking for conversations about baloney instead of facts about baloney ...

//interestingly, in South-Africa, the main company that makes baloney (enterprise), spells it as Polony ... it seems like it's the same thing though Source

You'ld select the context in which you wanted to search from a list of them, then default to a store context as the default.

Just what we were looking for. These tags can help with SEO as they will avoid any issue of duplicate content and show your good faith to the bots. It also will avoid the true author from being outranked by your sraping or quoting so that's fair too.