If you have floats, you can use inset page numbers with spans and an appropriate<div>stylesheet.</div><div><br></div><div><div><div>But fundamentally what you&#39;re running into, and I don&#39;t know how you avoid it if you</div>
</div></div><div>insist on XML/XHTML, is that books simply aren&#39;t well-formed in the way that</div><div>XML defines and requires. You can&#39;t embed everything 100% in all its containers.</div><div><br></div><div>Page numbers are a reflection of this problem, because conceptually they are</div>
<div>boundaries between page elements. But page elements simply aren&#39;t well-formed</div><div>because their tops and bottoms can cut right through paragraphs (and everything</div><div>within which paragraphs are embredded.)</div>
<div><br></div><div>I think what happened to some devices is that they had to decide between</div><div>supporting HTML and XHTML, and since writers can&#39;t be constrained to</div><div>create well-formed XML documents (nor should they be), the devices</div>
<div> had to choose HTML.</div>