On that note though, there is one thing that people have been doing for the past 5 or so years, maybe a bit more, with the formatting when they write online. In particular I see it often on Medium.com
They use blockquote to highlight some piece of their text. But the text in the blockquote is not a quote. Neither from elsewhere nor from their own text.
This annoys me.
AFAIK, blockquote has a history in the printed press of being used to catch your eye when you flick through a newspaper, so that you would want to buy the paper and read the article on that page. And the text in the blockquote was extracted from the text itself. Often from a part of it where a person that was interviewed said something that the editors found interesting. At least, that’s how I remember it.
Another type of use it is suitable for is to distinguish something quoted from elsewhere from the rest of the text.
But the way that it is being used now, it confuses and annoys my brain every time.