It’s 2012, already! Why are we still relying on pictures of typographical symbols? Let’s do it with the power of CSS!

Let’s start with some simple HTML. Before we can style anything, we need to create our blockquote. While we’re at it, a cite element is a nice, semantic way to attribute the quote to its originator.

<blockquote>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris eget leo nunc, nec tempus mi? Curabitur id nisl mi, ut vulputate urna. Quisque porta facilisis tortor, vitae bibendum velit fringilla vitae! Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Mauris eget leo nunc, nec tempus mi? Curabitur id nisl mi, ut vulputate urna. Quisque porta facilisis tortor, vitae bibendum velit fringilla vitae!
<cite>Somebody famous</cite>
</blockquote>

Now some CSS to provide some basic styling for the blockquote. Leaving the default browser style isn’t going to look great, so we’ll use a largish serif font with a little extra line spacing. And a slightly lighter color. Extra-dark grey adds a subtle variation from your main body text.

blockquote {
font-family: Georgia, serif;
font-size: 18px;
font-style: italic;
width: 500px;
margin: 0.25em 0;
padding: 0.25em 40px;
line-height: 1.45;
position: relative;
color: #383838;
}

Now for the fun part: the giant quotation mark. The :before pseudo-element can be used to dynamically insert content before the text of the element, and style the content you insert. This is great for decorative text, like stylistic curly-quotes. The trick is to use an escaped hexadecimal representation of the desired character, and a little bit of fiddly positioning stuff to make it sit in the right position.

blockquote:before {
display: block;
content: "\201C";
font-size: 80px;
position: absolute;
left: -20px;
top: -20px;
color: #7a7a7a;
}

That’s the most difficult part. You may have to experiment with the size and positioning until it looks right, though. Once everything looks nice, you can apply the same technique to style the citation. Using the :before pseudo-element, you can insert an em dash and a space before the text.

blockquote cite {
color: #999999;
font-size: 14px;
display: block;
margin-top: 5px;
}

blockquote cite:before {
content: "\2014 \2009";
}

Easy, isn’t it? The effect should work in all modern browsers, and IE8. (IE8 will only process the pseudo-element if your document has a doctype declared, but you should have one of those already…) In browsers that don’t support it, the added content simply won’t appear, leaving the main text of the blockquote (and the citation) intact. The other styling will remain, of course, so it should still look good enough.

You can see a live demo here.

They are named thus because they are short excerpts pulled from the article, and highlighted to draw your attention.

Pullquotes on websites are generally blockquotes with a specific class assigned. Some CSS magic is applied to the class, and you have your pullquotes set-up.

I don’t use pullquotes too often, but I have classes defined nevertheless. (See my example pullquote above? It will look like a plain, unstyled blockquote if you’re reading this in an RSS reader. Visit the permalink page for the full effect.)

Here is my CSS:

.rpullquote, .lpullquote {
padding: 5px;
width: 202px;
margin-top: 8px;
margin-bottom: 8px;
border-top-width: 2px;
border-bottom-width: 2px;
border-top-style: solid;
border-bottom-style: solid;
border-top-color: #990100;
border-bottom-color: #990100;
font-size: 15px;
text-align: center;
line-height: 1.1em;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-style: italic;
font-weight: normal;
background-image:none;
}

.rpullquote {
float: right;
margin-left: 10px;
}

.lpullquote {
float: left;
margin-right: 10px;
}

As you can see, the first rule controls the visual aspect of the pullquotes, and the following two are used to float the pullquotes to either the left or the right. Feel free to tweak the styles to fit your stylesheet better.

Now, whenever you want to create a pullquote, just follow these steps:

1. Copy the text you want to quote.
2. Paste it into a new blockquote tag.
3. Add class="rpullquote" or class="lpullquote" (right and left, respectfully) to the tag.

This is an example blockquote, after applying some styling. Make something similar, or do your own thing.

Like my blockquote styling? I’ll show you how it’s done.

Here is a CSS rule that outputs a similar result:

blockquote {
margin:22px 40px;
padding:3px;
color:#575757;
padding: 0 50px;
background: transparent url("images/blockquote.gif") no-repeat 0 0;
}

You will need a “quote-mark” image of about 32×32 pixels for this to work correctly. To make one yourself, create a new image and type a #e5e5e9 quote-mark into it.

Of course, you may want to tweak the color values and spacing so it fits into your template correctly.

The blockquote is one of the bloggers’ most-used tags. It’s a great way to quote an excerpt from a post you’re linking to, as I do frequently.