<p>Is there any benefit in using a <code>&lt;blockquote&gt;</code> element over a <code>&lt;div&gt;</code>? I was looking at a website's markup to learn CSS and I couldn't figure out why the <code>&lt;blockquote&gt;</code> was being used.</p>

<p>EDIT: Yeah sorry I didn't clarify, it was used to hold the <code>&lt;div&gt;</code> tag with username as 'text' and an <code>input</code> tag. There was clearly no quote.</p>

[{'answer_id': 42896, 'author': 'pix0r', 'author_id': 72, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/72', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>Semantically, a <code>blockquote</code> tag makes sense when you're quoting something.  Sure, a stylized div can do the same thing, but why not use the right tag for the job?</p>\n\n<p>Additionally, the blockquote tag allows you to include a citation with the <code>cite</code> attribute.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 42898, 'author': 'John Millikin', 'author_id': 3560, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/3560', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p><code>&lt;blockquote&gt;</code> should be used when the text it contains is a block quote. This sounds very obvious to me, so is there another aspect to your question?</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 42922, 'author': 'Slartibartfast', 'author_id': 4433, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/4433', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>As mentioned, <code>&lt;blockquote&gt;</code> is for quoting. Similarly you will use several <code>&lt;p&gt;</code> blocks for paragraphs within one <code>&lt;div&gt;</code> that holds page content or whatever. HTML5 proposal will have lot more block elements (i.e same as divs) which purpose will be to add a semantic info about it, such as header, footer, menu, etc.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 42925, 'author': 'Erik van Brakel', 'author_id': 909, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/909', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>As mentioned earlier, blockquotes are for quotes. Just like tables are (arguably) for tabular data, lists are for listings, divs for divisions, p for paragraphs, etc.</p>\n\n<p>Sure, you could almost everything with divs. That\'s the beauty of using HTML with CSS: you can make anything look however you want it to look (in theory, in the real world browser quirks mess that up sometimes).</p>\n\n<p>Using divs for anything you can think of is commonly known as \'divitis\'. See <a href="http://csscreator.com/?q=divitis" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this article</a> for a little explanation :)</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 42979, 'author': 'Nathan Long', 'author_id': 4376, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/4376', 'pm_score': 4, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>In theory, HTML should be as "semantic" as possible - meaning that every element should indicate something about its content. <code>&lt;h1&gt;</code><em>s</em>  should enclose the most important headline; <code>&lt;p&gt;</code><em>s</em>  should surround paragraphs; <code>&lt;em&gt;</code> should indicate emphasis, etc.</p>\n\n<p>That way the code makes sense when you - or a screen reader, or whatever - look at it. This also helps for devices that don\'t understand all (or any) of your CSS rules.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 43847, 'author': 'ceejayoz', 'author_id': 1902010, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1902010', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>The likely reason they're using <code>blockquote</code> is that many people dabbling in HTML don't know enough about CSS to know that a <code>div</code> can be given the same left-margin as <code>blockquote</code> renders with by default.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 58892847, 'author': 'Community', 'author_id': -1, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/-1', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Easy peasy, right? Nothing has really changed. Remember that as  is a ‘block-level element’ (flow content) we can put most anything in it, including headers, images, and tables, in addition to the usual paragraphs of text. There are a couple of slight differences in HTML5 though.  is a sectioning root, meaning that any - elements it contains don’t become part of the document’s outline. Also, adding a single paragraph of text with no enclosing <p> tags is now completely kosher. Here are some simple  examples (apologies for the fake content):</p>\n\n<p>The suggestions in my article came directly from writing and editing a few megs worth of raw text used on my website, which bought up lots of edge-cases and curious questions about semantics; so whilst I wouldn’t say my choices would suit everybody, they have at least been trialed in a background of the text.</p>\n\n<p>My complaint about the ABBR article you published here on HTML5Doctor was essential that you weren’t following your own advice, as I know that I practically went insane trying to use those rules on megs of text before I came up with my own to take back control of my sanity.</p>\n\n<p>But, I will definitely say that cite still remains the weaker out of the three and I appreciate this article for being far more square.</p>\n\n<p>If you would like, my article could be further adapted with feedback from the doctors to better suit a broader audience. I strongly believe that a key part of learning HTML5 is learning HTML4 <em>properly</em> and eschewing spans and divs for semantics where possible</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/42894', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/438/']