Importing Html into Adobe Indesign

Maybe you can use a Markdown to InDesign translater as a starting point: http://www.jongware.com/markdownid.html

You'll need to translate the HTML tags into CharacterStyles, and apply those to the XML on import.

The tricky thing is that CharacterStyles can't be applied nested like HTML can, so you need to make a CharacterStyle for each combination that might be present. Or you can apply styles to the specific run of text, with a script.

We have had some bad experiences importing xml into InDesign directly.

If you are still having trouble with this issue, check out the open source Ickmull code library. It converts an xhtml file to an idml file, that can then be opened in InDesign. This might be a better web to print workflow for you.

http://code.google.com/p/ickmull/

Pandoc now support export to ICML (Adobe InCopy's XML format that can be "placed" in InDesign documents). To convert HTML to ICML:

pandoc --standalone -o output.icml input.html

See Importing Markdown in InDesign in the pandoc wiki for details around the workflow.