Question

I’m trying to wrap text in some big nice double quotes. I looked at this tutorial, but seems a little more complicated than I thought it should be. My gut tells me someone here in SO knows a smarter way. I’m open to anything: CSS, or PHP or Javascript, or Jquery (but preferably not JS/Jquery)

Answer 1

The tutorial doesn’t look too complicated to me—I think their method is quite a good one.
If you don’t like specifying one of the background images in :first-letter, you could use CSS3’s support for multiple background images:

blockquote {
    background: url("open-quote.gif") top left no-repeat,
            url("close-quote.gif") bottom right no-repeat;
    /* Other rules... */
}

…but this will only work in some browsers.

If I were you, I’d use the method described in the tutorial.