Hmmm,
I tend to think in old-school ways. And I want to use the minimum I can get away with, without losing presentation. But I'm not an expert, just a hack; I dig the logical-expression mode, and I can grow. 'Course we're (or at least, I'm) also talking about adapting/stripping found files, not starting from scratch. They may have these tags already, and only need to be simplified. But I guess if you can find them and simplify them, you can translate them too.
-- attributes: the formatting is all I'm after -- is there a better way, in a single tag, to indicate alignment? Without CSS?
-- <strong> an <em> are fine with me, too. (But my REB1100 likes <b> and <i>... rbmake fixes that.) I still find <i> and <b> more human readable. (Which is a major part of my goals in reformatting.)
-- <whatever id="..."> is XML, right? Why is this better? I assume one can link to the created/named tag?
-- I've never understood <span> and <div> more than generally as a sort of box to drop things into. Chapters, paragraphs, etc are already containing almost everything. Care to elucidate (with an example maybe?) Most of the time I see them in Microsoft cruft, and it's a lot more readable to convert them to <i> or <b> -- or delete them as they don't do much more than repeat font info, or language, or some other useless overload. Occasionally, they suggest alignment.
-- I actually do that too, with the final product (ie: class="chapter", class="subtitle"), but aren't these attributes? I do it so that if someone wants to convert/strip my HTML, it's easy to find. But I don't drop it on every paragraph or blockquote. I can see why I might do it on a blockquote, though.
BTW, I just tried HTMLtidy and hstrip in sequence on a crufty file, and it did pretty well. HTMLtidy reordered the attributes to alphabetical for me, along with a lot of other stuff, so that it will be easier to replace similar paragraph tags. And hstrip did a great job of ditching CSS and javascript. The question now is "Did it eat any formatting?" That'll take longer to decide.
m a r