I silently implied this point, approx. 99.9 % of all posts here are in English and the referenced W3C section motivates the use of <q> for language specific adaptation which is not really relevant here.

I'd rather prefer better support for the already available PM-markup.

<blockquote> is nice for quotes from other sites, especially perldoc related, but not really for citing previous comments in a thread.

(see how I tried to use "email style" for your comment)

So the problem is rather that we'd need a multitude of markups to mark all semantically different kind of quotes ( "so called", "citation" , code , perldoc, ...)

Furthermore <code> can't distinguish between perl-code (which might be highlighted) or other languages or cut and paste from the console.¹

Of course one could argue that all these markups, including <q> could be indicidually customized via CSS, but I doubt many monks really take advantage of manipulating their local CSS.

update

> You mean inch-marks ("), right?

not only. there are different quotation marks, especially 'single quotes'

¹) and it really sucks to paste code from the win console, b/c of all the useless whitespace breaking the format.