What you are suggesting looks like wiki formating, and I find it odd having a mixture of formating rules when you want to output HTML.

I personally believe that metaperl's suggestion does not fit well in the monastery. But to be precise, there are many wiki languages which are not incompatible with raw html code, so your argument is not valid. Said this, I do like jdporter, except that my template is slightly different.

What I'd really really like is an "official" <quote> tag, which would probably amount to a <blockquote> of an appropriate class behind the curtains. But I asked about it already, and it's not goint to be implemented, it seems.