Sounds like XML and XSL would be a great fit here. Shame it’s being deprecated.

But you could still use HTML. Elements with a dash in are reserved for custom elements (that is, a new standardised element will never take that name) so you could do:

    <paper-author-list>
      <paper-author />
    </paper-author-list>

And it would be valid HTML. Then you’d style it with CSS, with

    paper-author {
      display: list-item;
    }

And so on.