There is no solution for the Q element
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006
Stacey Cordoni recently posted an article on A List Apart entitled "Long Live the Q Tag". The article discusses the problems with the q element stemming from Internet Explorer’s continuing lack of support and talks about some alternative solutions. The solution she settles on is to use q elements with the default quotation marks removed via CSS styling and manual quotation mark characters added directly in the HTML source outside the element.
This is not an adequate solution. It completely ignores user agents that don’t support CSS or have it disabled. Text browsers that correctly support HTML and don’t support CSS would render such a quotation delimited by two pairs of quotation marks. lynx is such a browser.
I have found that there is no true solution for the problem with the q element. Unfortunately, the problem isn’t exclusive to Internet Explorer either, as there are other user agents that fail to handle the q element correctly. ELinks behaves like Internet Explorer in this respect.
The reality is that the q element simply won’t behave consistently in all major browsers no matter what you do, and so its use should be avoided.