In HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 and XHTML

XHTML

XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....

, the blockquote element

HTML element

An HTML element is an individual component of an HTML document. HTML documents are composed of a tree of HTML elements and other nodes, such as text nodes. Each element can have attributes specified. Elements can also have content, including other elements and text. HTML elements represent...

 defines a block quotation within the text. The syntax is <blockquote><p>blockquoted text goes here</p></blockquote>.

The blockquote element is used to indicate the quotation of a large section of text from another source. Using the default HTML styling of most web browsers, it will indent the right and left margins both on the display and in printed form.

The non-semantic use of the blockquote element purely to indent text is deprecated by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium

World Wide Web Consortium

The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...

) in the current (1999) HTML 4.01 Specification, which is also the basis for XHTML 1.0. The preferred approach is the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...

).

Usage

Related (X)HTML element

HTML element

An HTML element is an individual component of an HTML document. HTML documents are composed of a tree of HTML elements and other nodes, such as text nodes. Each element can have attributes specified. Elements can also have content, including other elements and text. HTML elements represent...

s include the <q> and <cite> elements for shorter, probably in-line, quotations and for citations respectively. An (X)HTML attribute specific to the <blockquote> and <q> elements is cite= where the provenance of the material quoted may be given. If the quotation is in a language other than that of the main document, lang= and maybe dir= attributes may be relevant to specify the language of the quoted text and perhaps its direction, left-to-right or right-to-left.

Relationship to some wiki markup and usage

In many Wiki

Wiki

A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

 markup languages

Wikitext

Wikitext language, or wiki markup, is a lightweight markup language used to write pages in wiki websites, such as Wikipedia, and is a simplified alternative/intermediate to HTML. Its ultimate purpose is to be converted by wiki software into HTML, which in turn is served to web browsers.There is no...

, the semantics and effect of HTML <blockquote> is different from the use of an initial colon in a paragraph, which may be translated into an HTML dd element enclosed within a dl element. (That is a ‘data definition’ within a ‘definition list’, without there being any preceding ‘data term’ or dt element).