Dear Doug Ewell, fantasai and List:
I will try to sort out these diverse pieces of advice.
What's the point, really, of going far beyond, even beyond CSS, into XHTML, where few computational Hebraists have gone before?
You're right Helen, the web is full of non XHTML conforming documents. You probably don't need full XHTML conformance too, but having your document respect the XML nesting and closure of elements is certainly a must today, because it avoids most interoperability problems in browsers.
So: make sure all your HTML elements and attributes are lowercase, and close ALL elements (even empty elements that should be closed by " />" instead of just ">", for example <br /> instead of <br>, and even <li>...</li>, or <p>...</p>).
And then don't embed structural block elements
(like <p>...</p> or <div>..</div> or <blockquote>...</blockquote>
or <li>...</li> or <table>...</table>)
within inline elements
(like <b>...</b> or <font>...</font> or <a href="...">...</a>
or <span>...</span>)
Note that most inline elements are related to style, and they better fit outside of the body by assigning style classes to the structural elements (most of them are block elements).
XHTML has deprecated most inline style elements, in favor of external specification of style through the class property added to structural block elements. XHTML has an excellent interoperability with a wider range of browsers, including old ones, except for the effective rendering of some CSS styles.
The cost to convert an HTML file to full XML well-formedness is minor for you, but this allows you to use XML editors to make sure the document is properly nested, a pre-condition that will greatly help its interoperable interpretation.
If you have FrontPage XP or 2003, you can use its "apply XML formatting rules" option to make this job nearly automatically, and make sure that all elements are properly nested and closed.
