**Or at least look a little better.**

I like to put an image or a pull quote in my weblog postings to break up the gray of pure text. I also prefer pulling summary Atom feeds to full ones into my reader, but I offer both on my weblog’s home page. I recently saw in logs that the Atom feed with my complete postings is more popular, and I knew that the pullquotes looked wrong there, so I’ve tried to fix it.

Because the full Atom feed version of the postings doesn’t know about the HTML version’s style sheet, which has a specific style for pull quotes, these look like an extra body text paragraph that happens to repeat something from one of the other paragraphs. To make them look more like pull quotes in those feeds, I’m now embedding the necessary CSS right in a style attribute of the blockquote element that holds the pullquote, so it should show up properly in the display of the full Atom feed version of each posting—or at least look a little better. Tunneling of CSS in the content does feel like cheating, in a purist markup geek kind of way, but those blockquote elements have their own class attribute with a value of “pullquote” if some automated process wanted to just find them and get rid of them, so I guess it’s not too bad.

It looks fine in Bloglines in recent releases of Firefox and IE. Let me know if it’s a mess elsewhere.

2 Comments

By Anthony B. Coates on October 18, 2007 3:56 AM

In Opera (when using it as a feed reader), the pull text shows up as an indented paragraph (i.e. blockquote), but not with text wrapping around it as it appears on the Web page.
Cheers, Tony.

By Bob DuCharme on October 18, 2007 8:08 AM

Hi Tony,

That’s how it looked in Bloglines before I made this change.

I just added tags to make it a little clearer that it’s not a regular blockquote.

See you in Boston!