Still working my the Kaprekar Series Generator Site redesign.

The menu on the site still uses a html table. Plan to move that to a pure CSS solution. But currently stumped as to what approach to go for! The current menu which uses table tags is (hopefully!) cross-browser - it will look more-or-less the same across various browsers. Should I move away from that?

Ideally I would like to place the menu in a simple xml structure like -

<div id="Navbar">
  <menu>
    <menutitle>
      <a href="...">Introduction</a>
    </menutitle>
    <menuitem>
      <a href="...">Sample Output</a>
    </menuitem>
    add other menu titles/items here
  </menu>
</div>

And then use CSS to display the above XML (No, I don't want to go the xslt route ... my server side doesn't support it). Something similar to what Project Gutenberg uses for Three Men in a Boat (Excellent book, btw! A must read).

But I wonder if this will be the right approach. What will be the effect of this approach on search engines? Will it effect my (meagre) search rankings? (since the tags menutitle and menuitem will be non-standard).

Another approach will be to use lists (<ul>) tags as detailed in A List Apart. Or the dotted menu demonstrated at Blue Robot.

But I don't see menus as lists and so I'm still confused as to what approach should I go for!