Hello Ernest,
You wrote:
>This would mean going back to the having the user agent provide the
> quoting characters as specified in HTML 4/XHTML 1 for the <q> element.
> There are two main problems with this. The first is that a commonly
used
> user agent for HTML 4 has never supported adding the quotes, nor the
> associated CSS quotes property.

I use this for inline quotations till IE is able to handle the <q>
element.
<q>
    <!--[if IE]>&quot;<![endif]-->Is this a solution?<!--[if
IE]>&quot;<![endif]-->
</q>

Greetings
Ineke van der Maat