Re: @quotation and @indentedblock in html and DocBook

[Karl Berry]

    for example using semantic
    output could allow better accessibility

No question.  But that's not what's going on here.
Neither <blockquote> nor css indent is especially semantic.
If anything, <blockquote> is more so.

Aside: Indeed, one of my recurring problems with CSS is that it is
routinely used to (try to) force particular fonts and font sizes, which
only decreases accessibiity for those of us with
lousy-but-not-nonexistent vision.  Just based on the population at
large, I venture to say there are considerably more people with
deficient vision squinting at tiny screens trying to make out tiny fonts
because of web site CSS than there are people using screen readers.  We
want to do the best we can for *everyone*, of course ... in my
experience, overspecification is worse than underspecification.  Anyway,
this is off the topic at hand.

    screen reading software does in the case of <blockquote>, 

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I presume that screen
reading software (I've never used such either) does the best that can be
done with the standard HTML tags, and it would only make things harder
to use CSS.  Saying "indent 3.2em" is not as meaningful as explicitly
saying "start indented block".

    It could also allow customization by the
    user of the browser to add their own stylings to all webpages. 

I think/hope that could be done either way.  We want to allow people to
do whatever they are crazy enough to want to do with CSS.  We just don't
want to do it ourselves.  IMHO.

    What @example, @display, etc., have in common with @indentedblock is
    that they should be indented, 

Fair enough, but what they don't have in common is that they don't do
filling.  Right now, the non-filled environments use <pre>+css for
indent.  That somehow seems better (more semantic!) to me than
<blockquote>+<br> for every line. 

@quotation and @indentedblock somehow seem to naturally map to
<blockquote>, but not @example.  An example is not, prima facie, a block
quote at all.

Thanks,
K