Turns out that you don't need explicit text paths. Firefox 3 has only partial support of the vertical alignment tags (see this thread). It also seems that dominant-baseline only works when applied as a style whereas text-anchor can be part of the style or a tag attribute.
<path d="M10, 20 L17, 20"
style="fill:none; color:black; stroke:black; stroke-width:1.00"/>
<text fill="black" font-family="sans-serif" font-size="16"
x="27" y="20" style="dominant-baseline: central;">
Vertical
</text>
<path d="M60, 40 L60, 47"
style="fill:none; color:red; stroke:red; stroke-width:1.00"/>
<text fill="red" font-family="sans-serif" font-size="16"
x="60" y="70" style="text-anchor: middle;">
Horizontal
</text>
<path d="M60, 90 L60, 97"
style="fill:none; color:blue; stroke:blue; stroke-width:1.00"/>
<text fill="blue" font-family="sans-serif" font-size="16"
x="60" y="97" style="text-anchor: middle; dominant-baseline: hanging;">
Bit of Both
</text>
This works in Firefox, unfortunately Inkscape doesn't seem to handle dominant-baseline (or at least not in the same way).