Ok, who stole the 'start' from my OL?

While I've been practicing semantic markup for years, today was the first time that I've needed to break an ordered list halfway through. I will illustrate with an example:

1. One

Subtitle
2. Two
3. Three

This was easy in the good old days of tables, frames and marquees; just add a start value to the second ol and away you go. However, that attribute was deprecated in HTML 4, and the CSS replacement doesn't work in most browsers. It's now actually impossible to implement a broken ol in HTML 4 Strict.

That sucks.

I wish to complain. After a little googling, it appears that I'm late to the party, as ever - people haves been complaining for years. But the amazing thing is that everyone is just complaining, and nobody has a workable solution.

The subtitle describes points two and three, so semantically it cannot go into list item 2. You could argue that I should format my list as follows:

1. One
2. Subtitle
   1. Two
   2. Three

However, among other things, that breaks the link between the printed document and the web-based version. Suddenly all references to point 3 now refer to a completely separate and unrelated point. This is not a solution.

The question is "Are the numbers at the start of each list item sematic or presentational?" - W3C say presentational, but they are wrong. There is nothing presentational about needing to refer to other points - if I didn't need to number them, I could use an unordered list.

It really does seem to be a step in the wrong direction to add a number in a span to the start of each list item. Has anyone found a better solution?

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