Advantages

• The blockquote tag can save you a lot of time. Instead of manually adding quotes and setting special margins for the quoted text, the blockquote provides a default setting that automatically sets the text apart. If you want to change how text within the blockquote tags appear, all you need to do is make the necessary changes to your Web page's cascading style sheet (CSS), which lets you make the changes you want only one time while applying them to all blockquote text on your site.
  
  

Usage

• Avoid using blockquotes for smaller quotations. Limit it to longer, paragraph-sized quotations or particularly important quotes that you want to highlight within the text. All of the major browsers display blockquote properly, and there is no syntax difference between using the tag in HTML and XHTML (extensible hypertext markup language). Make sure you close the blockquote text by placing a close tag at the end. Your code will look something like this:
  
  <blockquote>
  
  <p>Fourscore and seven years ago . . .</p>
  
  </blockquote>
  
  The "/" instructs the browser to close whatever tag is currently in use.
  
  

Formatting

• To use a blockquote, insert "<blockquote>" at the beginning of the text you want to highlight. Insert "</blockquote>" at the end of the text. You can also add a citation to the blockquote, to show where you found the quote. To do so, in the opening tag, add "cite=[URL]." It would look like this: <blockquote cite="http://site-address.com">. Major browsers do not use the cite tag, but search engines do use it when compiling search data.
  
  

Alternatives

• If you have a shorter quotation that you want to use as an inline quote, use the <q> tag. For example, "Lincoln said, <q>Fourscore and seven years ago</q>." The text within the <q> tags will appear within the paragraph, and it will have whatever attributes you assigned to it, if you changed them in the CSS. The "cite" attribute also works with the <q> tag.