Q on XML and article publishing...

I image thi shas been covered a thousand times on this list over the
years, but the search feature in the archives is broke, so I'm going to
have to ask this again... sorry.

I have lots (4k+) magazine articles with embedded HTML stored in a dabase
right now.

The HTML is not uniform is quality.

I'm using TIDY to "clean it up" so I have a uniform xHTML style.

These articels also have CSS tags embedded in them, I want to pull them out.

These articles are used across our several websites. All have the same look.

1) do I leave these in xHMTL format (wit or without CSS tags)?

2) do I "reduce" this to "pure" xml...

  <article>
     <author id="1234>
        <name>Walter</name>
        ...
     </author>
     [other publishing info]
     <content>
        <para>
          lots of text here
        </para>
        <sub-head>
          sub-head here
        </sub-head>
        <para>
          lots of text here
        </para>
     </content>
  </article>

or something like this

I'd like to use some "publishing standard" so other organizations can gain
access to our articles without much fuss.

Anyone have any ideas/pointers/URLs/etc they can share?

Thanks

Watler

PS: Also, how would new articles be created? The writers are not XML
codeers, nor should they be? How do you folks solve this?