Semantic markup for tabular data

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All, 

Despite the recent conversations on WYSIWYG, I've still 
managed to avoid moving to XML markup as my input method.
That may yet change...

So, help me grasp the paradigm.

Let's say that there's a certain set of info that I've been 
presenting in FrameMaker (to PDF) or in RoboHelp (to WebHelp) 
in the form of a table.

It's not super-complicated, but it's not vanilla X-Y. So, 
my question is how it would be tagged such that a following 
step/application could know that these are not just little 
paragraphs, they need special treatment ... regardless of 
the ultimate output format?

Imagine a simple, lookup compatibility table. My customer 
wants to go to one place, pick out the sort of computers 
he has in his shop, run a finger across the page, and 
see which of our products line up (i.e., are compatible).

Well, that's pretty simple to draw.

What about if, each platform or OS has two, three, four 
flavors (like, Solaris has 7, 8 (32 or 64-bit), 9, and 
we may only have tested on a couple of SunBlades and Ultras)?
In WYSIWYG I'd whip up a table with a column down the 
side for major platforms, and a second column for the 
specific models/lines. The major names would each straddle 
several of the rows in the second column. Windows would 
break out into 98, NT, 2000, XP... HP-UX would break out 
into 10.x, 10.y, 11i, etc. (and there's Linux and AIX and...)

Now, across the top of this table, I'd have our major 
product lines, and below that a row of models, and below 
that, a row with versions/releases of those models. Again, 
the big categories straddle the columns of the sub-category, 
which in turn straddle the columns of the versions-per-model.

BOOM! It's visually obvious what's going on. The customer, 
running his finger across the page from Solaris 8 finds 
several columns in which one of our product's versions are 
matched.
Because he's running a shop that also has Windows systems, 
he can look down and see which of our products support BOTH 
the platforms that he's got. He visually drops his eye from 
where his finger landed for Solaris, and sees that there's 
also an X or a "supported" or a "superseded" where the 
Windows 2000 row crosses that same column.  Cool.

Customer knows he can order several of the exact same model 
and version, and they can attach to any of his systems.
He doesn't need to track various versions of our product 
in his shop.

But that's how I present the data when I've got WYSIWYG 
control (say, in FrameMaker).  Now, I'll need to just 
tag the text in some way that says nothing about its 
visual orientation with neighboring text. 

When you are totally unconcerned with what the end product 
will look like, how do you tag the input data so that it 
will be inherently understandable when it gets parsed by 
some output app?

For that matter, several hundred cells in my above table 
might have had one of just four "words" in them: "supported" 
"tested" "superseded" " "  (that last one is just empty, 
indicating "not supported or tested".  It would be rather 
silly to just have hundreds of 'random' one-word (or no-word) 
paragraphs. 

So, I'd probably make a paragraph for each of our possible 
product variants, and then attach meta-data saying whether 
it was supported or tested with each of the three-dozen 
OS variants?

Somebody can write a DTD or CSS that will re-assemble those 
elements into a visually comprehensible, compact display, 
like (but not necessarily so) the table that I used to publish?
Since I'm a one-writer department, I'll be the poor fool 
trying to figure that out?  Hmm.

I've got it wrong, don't I?

We're moving to XML for our product interface, and the boss 
thinks that the documentation should therefore go XML... 
and if some of it, then all of it, so that same/related 
tools can be used to process any of it.

/kevin (not quite ready to make the leap)

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