z.m.l. can handle lists, and makes them simple for you too.
sure, lists aren't that common in classic literature, but there are still a good number of them sprinkled in the e-texts.
the two types of lists with which most people are familiar are (a) bullet lists and (b) numbered lists. unlike markup languages, z.m.l. won't number your lists for you automatically, you have to do it yourself. sorry about that. shouldn't be that much trouble.
just make your lists in the typical manner, and the z.m.l.-viewer should recognize them just fine, and treat them appropriately.
for example, it will recognize the list as a "block" and thus strive to avoid placing a pagebreak right in the middle of it.
it also will retain the linebreaks of the list, and not rewrap it. this is the case even if the lines of the list do not contain leading whitespace, so there's no need for such whitespace. (i might change this down the line if it causes complications.)
you can use any of the non-numeric characters on the top row of a qwerty-keyboard as your "bullet" character in a bullet list. the only thing you must do is leave a space after the character. the list items will then be indented from the bullet character, and any continuation-lines will also receive that indentation.
in general, you should not place blank lines between the lines in a list, not unless there are just a few such lines, because that increases the chance the list will over-run the pagesize.
and when there is room on the page, the viewer-app will space out the lines of a list, in order to enhance readability, so there's no need for blank lines between items to do that.
if you use a numbered list, the z.m.l. viewer-program will also indent continuation-lines of items contained in the list; and if the numbering has decimals, like a numbered outline -- in the style that is extremely common in tech manuals -- such as 1.1 and 1.11, they'll receive successive indentations, creating a very nice looking rendering, if i do say so myself.
it should be noted that some of the things that you might not think of as being lists are nonetheless treated as such by the z.m.l.-viewer, such as a table of contents or illustrations.
i guess i forgot to mention this back on rule #4, which discussed the other types of "units" or "blocks" -- such as block-quotes -- but these "units" are themselves placed into a menu of their own by the z.m.l.-viewer, so the user can easily jump right to them, just another way that the viewer-program helps the end-reader to "get a handle" on the underlying structure of the e-book and to navigate it easily. (footnotes also go in that menu.)