Is there a way of having Wordpress render `the_category()` items as an (x)html list?

I'm using the following to render the_tags() in Wordpress 2.9.2, currently developing a theme on localhost:

<?php the_tags('<ul class="postmetadata"><li>','</li><li>','</li></ul>'); ?>

and would like to have same -near-semantic- output from the_category开发者_JS百科(), which doesn't seem obviously attainable (having looked at the relevant codex page).

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If you call the_category() without any arguments, it will output an unordered list by default.

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you can use wp_list_categories()