Sunday, January 14, 2007

Blogger Question

My good friend Daniel Kricke, a 20-something journalism student from Chicago, has started up a blog called Extravadanza . You should check it out, especially if you like sports and pop culture. But, he's having a problem with the blogger system and I thought I'd put it out here to all those techy types and see if someone knows the solution:

"I posted a new entry. But see how I have that blockquote at the bottom? I want to get a block quote like that on the other side of that too...like a closing quote. But it won't do it."

Anyone know? I couldn't help him, I obviously don't even know how to get ONE blockquote! (see above). 5 Albert Halls (my version of the trend sweeping the blogosphere) for the first person to figure it out.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The open-quote image is part of the CSS styles associated with the blog: it's just a positioned background image, added using this rule:

blockquote {
background: url(http://www.blogblog.com/tictac/quotes.gif) no-repeat top left;
}

(View source on his page and search for "blockquote" to see the full rule, which also sets the font size, margins, etc.)

The problem with CSS 2.1 (and previous versions) is that you can only assign one background image to a particular element. In this case, because there's a background image that's positioned at the top left of the blockquote, that means it's impossible to have another at the bottom right. CSS3 (currently in development but unreleased) defines a way to accomplish it, but browsers don't support it yet.

People have come up with various workarounds, but I don't think Blogger supports any of them since they involve JavaScript or adding additional "meaningless" elements at an HTML level. The HTML would look something like:

<div class="blockquote-wrapper">
<blockquote>
my quote
</blockquote>
</div>

and the additional CSS like:

div.blockquote-wrapper {
background: url(http://example.com/close-quotes.gif) no-repeat bottom right;
}

But for now, you can't get there from here.

Dan said...

Thanks for the post tammy, and thanks for the help Peter. That's interesting, and a little disappointing. Oh well.