The q tag is, just like the blockquote tag, used for displaying quotes. The difference is that the blockquote tag is for long quotes which spans more than one line, while the q tag is for short, one-line quotes. The tag can be used like this:

<q>This is merely a short quote!</q>

The result looks like this in your browser:

 

This is merely a short quote!

 

As you can probably see, the browser automatically puts quotes around the tag. If you have a quote inside a quote, the browser will handle this too:

<q>This is merely a <q>short, he said</q> quote!</q>

Resulting in:

 

This is merely a short, he said quote!

 

The cool thing about it is that you can use the lang attribute to specify the language of the quote. By doing so, the browser will respect the specified language's rules for quotations, which can differ quite a bit. For instance, like this:

<q lang="en-us">This is merely a <q lang="en-us">short, he said</q> quote!</q>

The cite attribute

The cite attribute can be used for specifying a source URL for the quote. For instance, here is a quote from Google, where we use the cite attribute to specify the page where we found it:

<q cite="http://www.google.com/corporate/">Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.</q>

Once again, it's up to the browser how to render this extra information, and most browsers chooses not to render it at all. That doesn't mean it's not useful though - the value might be picked up by search bots etc.

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