Thoughts On Blogger and HTML Standards

I've been using Blogger for a while now. I liked the Beta upgrade (so much in fact that I moved my last non-blogger blog here). However trying to hand-roll the HTML seemed to become more of a pain because, even though I removed auto paragraph breaks and added in my own paragraphs, it seemed to have incorrect spacing. So I stopped doing this and let blogger deal with it. The thing is blogger uses <br/> to space things. You can't create headings you can just pretend by increasing your font size. Even clicking the bold button actually just does a span with style information on. To a non-CSS browser (lynx say) this means the bold text doesn't mean anything. It seems to have removed all semantic mark-up and that, quite frankly, bothers me.

We can do all sorts of clever things with CSS but we can't do that if there is nothing to work with (in terms of elements and classes). Want a print version with a TOC, suddenly more difficult when you can't find out what things are headings. It seems such a shame. Hopefully it will improve in future versions, though I'm very confused why they don't use <em> and <strong>. I'm sure someone might be upset if it didn't render bold correctly if they changed their stylesheet, but then again they changed their stylesheet... so they can just go ahead and change it back.