Presentational Subset of HTML

It is popular to suggest that HTML markup should be semantic and presentational styling should be applied near-exclusively by stylesheets. In practice, this is not how HTML is used. For instance, people nearly never refer to * or _ as "strong importance, seriousness, or urgency" or "stress emphasis" markers. They refer to them as bold and italics and use them that way. When people write an article on Medium or Google Docs and click the bold button, they don't think "oh this text is of strong seriousness and should be marked as such"; they want it to be a thicker, perhaps darker, font, i.e. bold.

Non-Textual Elements

img for images.
video for videos (content between the tags is ignored).
audio for audio (content between the tags is ignored).
iframe for including other content like YouTube videos, Tweets, etc.
hr for a section break.

Inline Elements

a for links.
s for strikethrough. del as an alias for compatibility.
code for monospace font. Like backticks in Markdown.
i for italics. em as an alias for compatibility.
b for bold. strong as an alias for compatibility.
u for underline.
mark for highlight. It should be rendered with a changed background color, but the color itself is not specified.
span is ignored for compatibility.
br for a single line break.

Block Elements

All block elements are separated from adjacent content with a blank line.

p for a paragraph. Visually it does nothing besides make the contents a block (and thus separated from adjacent content). div as an alias for compatibility.
pre for text rendered in a monospace font. Like a code block (three backticks) in Markdown. Placing the code element within pre does nothing as pre already monospaces the content.
blockquote for an indented and recolored quote.
ol for a numbered list.
ul for a bullet list.
- li for the elements enumerated within ol or ul. If not the immediate child of ol or ul, then it is treated like span and ignored.
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 for headers as used in Markdown.

Styles

This involves the following styles:

Code - monospace with grey background
Highlight - brighter background
Strikethrough
Underline
Bold
Italics

Formatters

Block
Header
Bullet
Number

Whitespace

Currently the plan with whitespace is to

Leave code and pre content alone
Collapse all other newline-containing whitespace into a single newline
Collapse all non-newline-containing whitespace into a single space
Prepend and append two newlines to each block
Collapse all sequences of over two newlines into two newlines
Trim all newlines from the beginning and end of the document.

Reasons Semantic is dead:

What are we going to mark sentences as sentences, questions as questions, etc?
People clearly use markup for visuals, not semantic.

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