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Every block, on one page

6 min read

This article exists to show every kind of block the editor can produce, one after another, on the real page rather than in isolation. If you are looking at it to judge spacing or rhythm, that is exactly what it is for.

Paragraphs and inline text

A paragraph carries limited inline markup — bold, emphasis and links — and nothing else. Anything pasted in from a word processor is stripped on save, which is why an article written elsewhere arrives here looking plain rather than looking broken.

The measure is capped a little under 70 characters. Longer lines are measurably harder to track back to the start of, and the effect compounds over an article of this length.

Lists

Two kinds, and the distinction is meaningful rather than decorative — numbers imply an order that has to be followed.

  • An unordered list, for things that have no sequence.
  • Each item is plain text, so nothing can be smuggled in as markup.
  • Long items wrap and stay aligned with the first line rather than the bullet.
  1. An ordered list, for steps.
  2. The numbering is generated, so inserting a step in the middle renumbers the rest.
  3. That is the whole reason not to type the numbers yourself.

Checklists

A checklist reads as something to work through rather than something to skim, which is why it is a separate block instead of a styled list.

  • Every item is a thing the reader can actually do
  • Nothing here is a claim that would need verifying
  • The marks are decorative — there is no state to save

Callouts

Four tones, each with a job. Using them for emphasis rather than for meaning is how a page ends up with six coloured boxes and no hierarchy.

Quotes

A pull quote is the one place on the page where a single sentence is allowed to take up as much room as a paragraph.
The style notes for this site

Images

Every image is a row in the media library referenced by id, never a pasted URL. That is what lets a photograph be replaced everywhere at once, and what stops a moved file breaking an article body.

A demonstration image placed as a single full-width block
A single image, with its caption underneath.

Alt text lives on the media row rather than on this block, so an image used in three articles is described once and stays described.

Galleries

First image in the demonstration gallery
One
Second image in the demonstration gallery
Two
Third image in the demonstration gallery
Three

Tables

Tables scroll inside their own container on a narrow screen rather than widening the page — a table is the single most common cause of a horizontal scrollbar on a phone.

BlockUse it forAvoid it for
ParagraphAlmost everythingLists written with dashes
ChecklistThings to doOrdinary bullet points
CalloutOne thing that mattersGeneral emphasis
TableGenuine comparisonLayout
FAQReal repeated questionsPadding out a thin article

Embedded video

Video is a facade: a poster frame served from our own domain, with the player loaded only once the reader presses play. Nothing reaches the provider before that, so an article carrying a video sets no third-party cookies until it is watched.

Frequently asked questions

An FAQ block is also emitted as structured data, so the questions can appear directly in a search result. That only works when they are questions someone actually asked.

Calls to action

That is every block. If something above looks wrong on your screen, it is worth fixing here first — this page is the fastest way to see all twelve at once.

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