DOCBOOK-APPS: shorthand versions of common tags

Many of the docbook tags that have HTML equivalents seem painfully verbose.
(Examples: <emphasis role="bold">, <listitem>). I was wondering if it would
be useful to create a wrapper stylesheet called something like shorthand.xsl
that would create aliases for these tages. This file would simply define
<li> as <listitem>, <i> or <b> as <emphasis>, and so on. It would take the
stylesheet to call as a param, so it could work for html, chunk, fo and
whatever else.

I'm not exactly sure how to implement this, but I'm sure it wouldn't be too
difficult and I could probably work it out. My question is, is it desirable?
I realize that it could get away from semantic markup, but I think its
convenience would be worth it.

Thanks,
Jack Cushman