In your
first proposal, the frame around buttons is not displayed in IE 5.0, and the last snippet comes as a single line in Opera 5. For the record, it looks readable in NN 4 but still different.
I'm itching to say that if you find yourself debugging something as simple as text formatting, you are overcomplicating things a bit somewhere.
Don't let me start how this is going to look in print from different browsers. Subtle features like fancy shading may well be gone on the printout, and color too. What's gauranteely left on the print is fixed width vs. variable width font, headers, and bold and italic attributes. I think, the old style could be used in print form well.
Please forgive me for only discussing problems. It's easier to critique others than to do something myself, you know :)
