I delayed responding hoping someone else may have an idea on this one. I struggle with this all the time and I don't know if there is a great balance. I personally try to do a little markup as possible in the strings, but there are times when its frankly much easier to add it there and easier to change/edit. So I really don't have any idea, seems this comes up more often now that we have moved more of the markup out of the sources (not all, but a good amount).
If I may chime in..perhaps you better off using as neutral tags as possible, making it easier to change it later on? Unless its absolutely better semantically(if it really IS a def. list for example, that require dl to make sense to screen readers etc), just using spans and even divs, goes a long way in providing hooks to style things. Simple as possible works best for themers that can't change its HTML code anwyay. List tags are not so useful then.
Heh, thats funny..I wrote I M H O and it translated it as "I am right, you are wrong" ? :o
LOL .. yeah we have been testing the word censor, there are lots of one off joke translations just for the fun of it. You may find things change around here from time to time since one way to test things is on a live site, so we enable, disable, etc to test.
:D