I am working on structuring a bunch of plaintext documents using HTML5, specifically the Swedish Code of Statutes. In these documents, lists are very common. Furthermore, the list item markers (1., 2., etc) are considered part of the semantic structure of the document, that is, sections may refer to e.g. "point 4. in section 1".

While I am happy to see that the value attribute has been resurrected for <li>, limiting it to integers is not enough in my case. There are several statutes with non-numerical list markers.  For example, SFS 1994:200, chapter 1, section 2 (available at http://lagen.nu/1994:200#K1P2) has items 1., 2., 4., 4 a., 4 b., 4 c., 4 d.

It would have been possible to represent this kind of list in HTML5 if the value attribute were not limited to integers. As it stands, I don't see a good way of having these lists represented in HTML: HTML makes incorrect assumptions about the semantic structure of lists.