Dave, this is a difficult problem. Any thought going into this will be helpful. It drives me crazy, as everyone probably knows, that html attributes are set in the tcl file. This is great for the developer, bad for the site maintainer, who is probably not interested in tcl code.
The plus is that general look and feel is centralized, but any move to get the details out of the tcl file would be an improvement.
One note on the format you are proposing: the html attribute is a tcl list. might it be possible to make it more atomic:
<formelement id="notes" rows="10" cols="80">
probably not, as you might need to replace all html attributes.
Overall, I think the problem is trying to replace html code with tcl code. You might get consistency, but it isn't easy to make changes in a few places.
