> No, I don't think that's the basic problem. The basic problem is that
> <q> was designed not to degrade gracefully. Browsers that do not
> recognize or do not support <q> markup now render just the context,
> omitting the potentially vital information that it's a quotation.
> Markup like <q><qm>"</qm>To be or not to be, that is the
> question<qm>"</qm>.</q> would degrade gracefully. Here qm elements
> would contain quotation marks that are to be omitted by user agents
> that support the q element. (Cf. to ideas of Ruby markup.)

That sounds like a great idea. Something similar could be designed for 
BLOCKQUOTE as well, I guess.


-- 
  Anne van Kesteren
  <http://annevankesteren.nl/ >