Well, I certainly did pick up on it yes. But probably only because I work as a software developer and because of that I am bound to analyse what someone requests and how that translates to particular functionality.
As for well made markup. Perhaps you did notice my use of -x-html and not html. Well formedness is an extremely important thing for me too. Perhaps I should have said strict xhtml 1.1 then
I am not sure if I completely agree with your need to create external links, simply because much of the reference material I visit on the internet has links to other documents...which all too often no longer exist. I prefer links only within the volume set of the book(s) which would be packaged in one file.