Could someone help a newbie with the following problem?

I finally found a way how to put a vertical menu in mojoPortal project (a secondary one, not the normal site one), created with Artisteer. Now, my problems are:

The items in the vertical menus have to be in form:

<a href="/my-item.aspx"><span class="l"></span><span class="r"></span><span class="t">My item</span></a>

This works quite well, but when I attempt to edit this menu using the built-in editor, it gets corrupted. After some investigation I realized that the culprit is the HTML editor, which removes the "empty" tags:

<span class="l"></span><span class="r"></span>

which are however vital for proper theming of the menu. This happens with all three built-in editors. It's enough to open the contents in the editor, press the Source (or HTML) button--and the tags are gone. Only the plain text editor (TextArea) leaves the contents untouched. It seems to me like a some kind of unwanted optimization. Did I overlooked an option to switch this off, or is it a known issue?

Thanks for any idea.

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your response. You're perfectly right: it's strange and it doesn't make sense. Unfortunatelly, my clients insist on this conceptless design, they are just hopeless. Some items even appear on both menus... Don't ask, I'll refrain from any further comments. So I have to manually edit the HTML source, as I don't know any method how to specify which item should appear on which menu.

All the built-in HTML editors destroy those mentioned tags immediately upon switching to source mode. They shouldn't do this in my opinion, though. So I have to manually change editors whenever I need to edit some contents with rich formatting.