RE: HTML5's Q element

I think this comes down to how HTML/HTML5 is going to be utilized, is it
describing a document object model; in which case a quote (or quoted text)
is an object and proper display of a quote object should be up to the user
agent, as informed by style sheets, thus keeping content and its face
separate. Or is HTML merely a markup language, in which case what is the
philosophical reason for having a q-tag? When is it used and why?

Back when there were proof-readers they would mark-up something that should
be a quote; isn't that what you're doing in html too? Quoted content needs
to be distinguishable from the content around it, which is done with
quotation-marks. Shouldn't the marks used in a document for quoted content
be identifiable through styles and/or along with a section of quoted text?
If so, isn't the quote tag the logical place to define those styles, either
in a global style or as a style attribute on the quote tag?

The localization argument I thought was a compelling argument for the user
agent to handle putting in quotes. It is an example of what is possible when
you treat a document as a DOM versus just marking up text. If quoted content
is treated like an object then things like localization are easier to
facilitate.

I would hope that content-editors such as DreamWeaver would help out by
indicating usage of " and q together and would somehow notify the user if
that is what they want to do. The specification should recommend against an
html renderer doing such checks though. I think people would figure out
quickly that things are double-quoted and fixing that shouldn't be hard.