This issue is impossible to fix, I am afraid. It is never good idea to use \text.. commands for larger chunks of text that contains paragraphs, tables, lists, etc. The \textsf inserts opening tag, but \begin{description} closes the current paragraph, which results in invalid XML structure. The same thing happens with the closing tag, which is inserted in another paragraph. \sffamily uses HTF fonts mechanism, which can respect paragraphs and styling is applied just to the text.

Hi there,
Wrapping an environment with \text{} (tried with in [bf,tt,sf]) breaks xtpipes with oolatex, f.i. the following

\documentclassh[a4paper]{report}

\begin{document}

\textsf{
  \begin{description}
  \item[foo] bar
  \end{description}
}

\end{document}

processed by

$ mk4ht oolatex test.tex

raises the following java exception:

System call: java -classpath /usr/share/texmf/tex4ht/bin/tex4ht.jar xtpipes -i /usr/share/texmf/tex4ht/xtpipes/ -o test.4oo test.tmp
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 44; columnNumber: 8; The element type "text:span" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "</text:span>".
        at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(AbstractSAXParser.java:1234)
        at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.SAXParserImpl$JAXPSAXParser.parse(SAXParserImpl.java:525)
        at org.xml.sax.helpers.XMLFilterImpl.parse(XMLFilterImpl.java:357)
        at xtpipes.Xtpipes.execute(Xtpipes.java:1300)
        at xtpipes.Xtpipes.execute(Xtpipes.java:783)
        at xtpipes.Xtpipes.mainMethod(Xtpipes.java:665)
        at xtpipes.Xtpipes.main(Xtpipes.java:70)
        at xtpipes.main(xtpipes.java:5)
--- xtpipes error 29 --- At <sax content-handler="xtpipes.util.ScriptsManager,tex4ht.OoFilter" lexical-handler="xtpipes.util.ScriptsManagerLH" > : While parsing file file:/home/marcoep/docs/curriculum/oolatex/test.tmp: : org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 44; columnNumber: 8; The element type "text:span" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "</text:span>".

I'm using tex4ht v20090611_p1038-r1 on Gentoo, with

$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_22"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.10.1) (Gentoo build 1.6.0_22-b22)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.0-b11, mixed mode)

$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_24"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_24-b07)
Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 19.1-b02, mixed mode)

Cheers,

^s