CSS and External Text

I’ve read many tutorials on how to apply styles to externally loaded txt files, and that’s great and all, but the way flash does it, you have to have:

variable=text and such. have a <p> tag here, an <a href=…> here

And it gets all messy and stuff, which is not the way one (or at least I) prefers to edit text and html. I’ve tried using XML with CSS, and it works alright, but I’m not really sure how to properly write/apply the styles from the CSS file. Does anybody know any neat ways to edit the txt files without actually leaving in white space added to keep it organized? Or does anybody know how to properly do it in XML?

What I’ve tried in XML is like this:

<text>
<fff_dreamer>text and such</fff_dreamer>
</text>

One big problem to top it off is incorporating shared fonts into the mix. I’ve checked the Lynda.com tutorials, and they’re not very helpful when it comes to my problem.

Thanks in advance