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Does anyone know of a document editor - either hosted online or (ideally cross-platform) desktop software - that can export clean HTML? By 'clean HTML' I mean HTML which has tags conveying only important semantic information (e.g. <p>, <h2>,<em>, etc.), and not presentational information.

The reason this would ideally be hosted online is to let me send an URL to people from different organisations with different levels of technical ability, and let them quickly start creating such documents without much instruction - so that, e.g., when they type return to create a new paragraph the only tag generated is <p>, not <br> or <p param="value">. Google Docs is one model for this.

I have done a few hours of research on this, and candidates which seemed to me to fail in one or other dimension include: Google Docs, KompoZer, Bluefish, Wavemaker, http://www.online-html-editor.org/, and others I'll add here later. You may disagree and I'd be curious to hear descriptions of how to use these in the way I've described.

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Although it is not a web app, I think that you should evaluate the excellent LyX editor. It is intended for writing LaTeX, but can also output other structured formats, among them HTML and DocBook. After a bit of (scriptable) editing of the output files, you should be able to generate a HTML snippet that only has semantic tags left. – jstarek Jan 20 at 12:20
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The best approach I've found is to use Word and then one of the tools at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/67964/what-is-the-best-free-way-to-clean-up-word-html (e.g. http://word2cleanhtml.com/ - though this does lose some semantic information, such as by converting headings to paragraphs).

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