Erik Moeller wrote in part:
We need the numbers because some people have auto-numbering turned on, and the TOC numbers should correspond to the auto-generated numbers within the headings.
As a user of auto-numbered headers, I'd be quite happy with ordered lists inside ordered lists, like so:
<ol><li>Header A <ol><li>Subheader a</li> <li>Subheader b</li> </ol></li> <li>Header B</li> </ol>
which generally appears along the lines of:
1 Header A 1 Subheader a 2 Subheader b 2 Header B
That seems pretty clear to me.
-- Toby