I was reading some posts on Coding Horror blog about working with the horrors of tag soup. It seems like the only way to simplify html generation is to use a templating engi
NDjango - django templates in .net
there are many view engines for asp.net mvc framework:
http://www.codeplex.com/MVCContrib
StringTemplate is a decent alternative.
Here's the ViewEngine (with Source), and some tutorials.