Using the simpleNavigation tag like this:

<cmsu:simpleNavigation startLevel="1" endLevel="1" style="simple-nav" />

results is this HTML (with angle braces turned to square braces) :

[span class="simple-nav"]
[ul class="level1"]
[li class="leaf"][a href="/author/Home/About.html">Child Page </a></li><li class="leaf"><a href="/author/Home/Birds.html"]Birds of a Feath[/a][/li]
...
[/ul]
[/span]

A UL tag cannot be nested in a SPAN tag since UL is a block element and SPAN is inline. There has been discussion on the developer's list to not emit a wrapper tag at all - just the UL tag with a css class assigned. Others have said that the wrapper tag should be switched to a DIV tag with the class assigned and that this keeps backwards compatability.

My own thoughts are that it does not make sense to have a tag output more then it needs to: If the purpose of the tag is to create a list, it should do just that. The user always has the ability to wrap the output as needed.

Also, that 'style' name is a bit misleading - how about 'class' or 'class-attrib' instead? Also, I would not be in favor of keeping the 'style' attribute around for the purpose of inserting actual css styling rules, since this can always be done more appropriately in the stylesheet. Inserting style rules in the html cripples the ability to create alternative stylesheets for palm devices, print formats, etc..