Ernest Cline wrote:
> In the root post of this thread, Lachlan proposed consolidating
> <quote> and <blockquote> and other such pairs of semantic
> elements into single elements which could be used in either
> the Block or the Inline context. This is what I was referring to.
> 
> In <div><quote><p/></quote></div>, the quote element
> here is clearly intended to be block.  Given the current
> state of CSS, this would force CSS to use a default value
> of the display property of <quote> to be block, as it is unable
> to adjust the properties of an element based on its children.
> Even if were able to, then in the case of <div><quote/></div>
> It would be unable to tell whether that quote element
> is supposed to be block or inline, and at least in the case
> of a quote, a block quote has a degree of emphasis
> over an inline quote.

I'm not sure I agree with this - I think you're looking at it from the 
wrong direction. A "block" quote can be defined not only by what it 
contains (which, as you say, can't be represented by a CSS selector), 
but also by what it is contained by.  An "inline" q element would tend 
to be a descendent of a p element; a "block" q element would not. This 
would seem to be handled by the following CSS rules:

q { display:block; }
p q { display:inline; }


> I feel that the distinction between block and inline is
> fundamental enough that to force styling to be provided
> to make the distinction is not a good idea.


- Chris Mannall.