If you export to HTML from InDesign you don't get text with basic formatting tags on it. Try exporting a sentence of text with a word bolded in the middle of it, and this is what you get:

That's completely useless. It should look like this:

<p>this is some <b>text</b> here</p>

Plus, all you have to do in Dreamweaver is select "Text with structure and basic formatting" in the Copy/Paste preferences and you don't get all the junk when copying from Word. You get HTML that looks exactly what I enter above: just basic formatting.

PLUS, I don't want to have to create a temporary file for each bit of text I want to copy out of InDesign, then open that file in Dreamweaver and copy the text from there. I want to copy once, and paste once.

I don't want to have to manually map styles in every single document I open just to be able to copy and paste text. It would take less time to copy the text, paste it into Word, then copy it from there and paste into Dreamweaver. This also works perfectly, but why should I have to do even this?

And, like I said, I don't want to have to create temporary files for each block of text I want to copy (which your method would involve).

The question really is, why is Word able to read the formatting (and has for years) and Dreamweaver still isn't?

Have you tried tag mapping with bullets? Here's what you get:

<ul>

<li><span class="char-style-override-2">•&#9;</span>And another bullet</li>

<li><span class="char-style-override-2">•&#9;</span>&#160;</li>

</ul>

It hard codes the bullet character into the text! Plus, if you don't create a new "bullet" style and apply it to all the text that has "Apply bullets" assigned to it (so that the style of the text is still the basic paragraph style), you get this:

<ul>

<p class="para-style-override-1"><span class="char-style-override-2">•&#9;</span>and here is a bullet.</p>

</ul>

There is no <li> tag. That's not even correct HTML formatting! So I wouldn't say tag mapping "works perfectly".