Not sure I understand the willingness to put < around all your text but not put a span??
CSS is pretty amazing. Depending on how well your targeted reader/app supports the current standards (:first-child, :first-line, etc.), you can get some pretty fancy formatting without having to do all the spans.
It would be interesting to see a sample of what you are trying to style. We might have a better solution than the < one.
Cheers,
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