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So, for authors, the trick is learning how to best replace the 'Typesetter' skills of olden days with knowledge of xhtml and css, so that the middle line may be walked
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That would help - but I don't like it. Authors should not be burdened by ... layout issues. It's almost a specialty in itself.
I remember one of the original promises of CSS was to separate content from appearance. Yet whenever I study markup or try to write PERL scripts to convert text to ePub - I am constantly hand-crafting tags inside the text trying to mimic the authors original concept.
With work - I can create something that can render on a web page, ePub or others, but I have to mark every line as being a type of paragraph/heading/etc. with a mind-numbing number of options.
Once I can do it by hand - I can automate the conversion .. but only until the next author gets more creative like embedding an email in the middle so they want every line of the email indented and justified into a perfect square, etc.
I suspect - we dont have tags/rules/techniques enough to markup the Guttenberg Bible let alone a modern short story.