The Quote Tag Nobody Trusted
browser wars 1997 still worksQ punctuates itself, nested pairs and all, and Internet Explorer spent a decade refusing to.
In 2026: Works everywhere now: Q draws its own quotation marks from CSS quotes, outer double, inner single, and swaps them by language. It was in HTML 4 in 1997, but Internet Explorer rendered it bare until IE8 in 2009, so authors who used it shipped unquoted text to most of their readers and learned to type quotes by hand. The tag works; the trust never recovered.
Where it came from: HTML 4.0, W3C, 1997. Internet Explorer rendered Q without quotation marks until version 8 in 2009.
MDN ↗HTML rendering spec ↗
<p style="font-size:1.15em">She said <q>He told me <q>never</q> to my face</q> and hung up.</p>
<p style="font:13px Verdana">Every quotation mark above was drawn by the browser:
outer double, inner single, nested automatically. In IE6 the same markup rendered
with no quotes at all, which is why nobody dared use it.</p>
<p lang="fr" style="font-size:1.15em"><q>Bonjour</q> gets guillemets in French.</p>