Don't Quote Me
So the poll fairly conclusively showed that in general LiveJournal users like their quotes to be in italics (and that there's some debate over what the <cite> tag is meant for). I was curious about that because of a post and discussion in 
suggestions which requested that LiveJournal remove the "font-style: italic" from the styling of <q> elements on site-scheme comment pages.
It eventually turned out (as I interpret it) that the author sees that style of LJ-comment quoting as a misuse of the <q> tag which is actually meant for anything that you would normally use quotation marks for within a paragraph (for example: I said <q>No, we didn't play that game yesterday either.</q> And
smallclanger replied <q>We should tell God to put us back to last night so we can play it.¹</q> Which if you read it in a book would not be italicised). I think he has a point, but unfortunately <q> is what you get when you press the Quote button² (unless your selection contains a linebreak, in which case it emits <blockquote>, which is inconsistent — but there's another suggestion about that) so I think we must probably view <q> as a bit of LiveJournal-specific markup and style it accordingly. Only in the comments, mind — uses of <q> are not italicised in the main post on a site-scheme page.
¹No, I have no idea where that came from.
²Not that many people use it, although the result was at least nonzero.
suggestions which requested that LiveJournal remove the "font-style: italic" from the styling of <q> elements on site-scheme comment pages.It eventually turned out (as I interpret it) that the author sees that style of LJ-comment quoting as a misuse of the <q> tag which is actually meant for anything that you would normally use quotation marks for within a paragraph (for example: I said <q>No, we didn't play that game yesterday either.</q> And
smallclanger replied <q>We should tell God to put us back to last night so we can play it.¹</q> Which if you read it in a book would not be italicised). I think he has a point, but unfortunately <q> is what you get when you press the Quote button² (unless your selection contains a linebreak, in which case it emits <blockquote>, which is inconsistent — but there's another suggestion about that) so I think we must probably view <q> as a bit of LiveJournal-specific markup and style it accordingly. Only in the comments, mind — uses of <q> are not italicised in the main post on a site-scheme page.¹No, I have no idea where that came from.
²Not that many people use it, although the result was at least nonzero.
Did you know about the <q> tag before my previous post?
yes
15(60.0%)
no
10(40.0%)
Do you use it to quote previous posters in LiveJournal comments?
yes
1(4.0%)
no
23(92.0%)
I didn't, but I will now
1(4.0%)
I did, but I won't now
0(0.0%)
Did you know about the <cite> tag before my previous post?
yes
20(80.0%)
no
5(20.0%)
Do you use it to quote previous posters in LiveJournal comments?
yes
6(24.0%)
no
19(76.0%)
I didn't, but I will now
0(0.0%)
I did, but I won't now
0(0.0%)
