It does look (unexpectedly) good
I guess, if I get it right, you could have a narrower width for the notes if you add "clear: right" to their style.
One wishes there was a way to have some vertical space between text and footnotes, but not between notes and notes (and the + CSS selector is no use, because the notes are not defined consecutively). By the way, no need to define the "width: 95%" for the text, you have the margins, the width is the rest.
As for "profanating XML", I don't see a problem, you enclose the footnotes in tags and place them (in the source) where they belong with respect to the main text...