I\'m writing a web service, and I want to return the data as XHTML. Because it\'s data, not markup, I want to keep it very clean - no extra 
It'd be best to wrap all of your elements in label elements, then apply css to the labels. The :before and :after pseudo classes are not completely supported in a consistent way.
Label tags have a lot of advantages including increased accessibility (on multiple levels) and more.
then use CSS on your label elements...
label {display:block;clear:both;}