‘Five Minute Argument’ is the personal site of Bobby Jack, a London-based Web Developer.
Punctuation at the beginning of a line can be set to ‘hang’ in the left-hand margin, creating a solid ‘edge’ and maintaining flow of the main body text.
Here at five minute argument, I make use of hanging punctuation for the intro paragraph’s drop-cap, in lists, and blockquotes. This page demonstrates how these examples are formatted.
The left hand edge of the text in the list items above should align vertically with this paragraph’s left edge. The bullets ‘hang’ to the left, positioned in the margin.
The bullets — numbered or otherwise — can be positioned like this in most browsers by setting the list’s left-hand margin and padding to 0. IE on the other hand, bucks the trend, and doesn't display bullets at all in this case. To resolve the problem, the list can be shifted to the left (by relatively positioning its left-hand edge), then pushed back with the same amount of padding. All browsers will then display the bullets; IE, it seems, needs somepadding space in which to display its bullets.
A similar technique can be used to display quotation marks around a blockquote.
short blockquote
this is a much longer blockquote containing enough text such that it should wrap over more than one line in almost any browser
‘Five Minute Argument’ is the personal site of Bobby Jack, a London-based Web Developer.