Recovering the web’s unclaimed legacy of academic text standards: SGML, HTML, and the misremediation of quotation

Abstract

This study examines the trajectory of inline and block quotation over the period in which HTML has undergone standardisation, from the introduction of the blockquote element to the HTML 1.0 specification (1993) to the current HTML 5 standard. The focus of the study is the distinct difference between the web’s current quotation practices and the legacy rule for short versus longer quotations as mandated by the body of academic style guides that began to emerge from the early 20th century. Working from a wide range of heterogeneous sources, the academic length-differentiated quotation rule is tracked from its inception, through its establishment as the academic norm in print, through its faithful remediation for digital workflows by the proximate antecedent of HTML, the leading SGML applications in text processing of the nineteen-eighties and early nineties. The consecutive hybridisation of block quotation with the text elements of the epigraph and the pullquote in the course of HTML’s standardisation process is treated as a misremediation that needlessly abandons continuity and vitiates the academic legacy’s virtues of clarity and coherence.