Boycott Movable Type!
Yes, Ben and Mena are cuteóat least, I guess it's cute that they're married and have this big successful new-internet company and all. But taken on it own merits, their company has issues. I mean, the company they run, not the company they keep. I mean, I'd be happy to have them over for dinner or something, I guess; they're fine company I'm sure. Er... But I can't complain too much about their product, and specifically their product's tendency to put two or even three <div>s around every element in the html it produces. And even worse! They're not even around the elements, they... Oh wait. What's that you say? I can complain too much about this? And I am, in fact, doing so now? Well then, don't click on that little link right below this text!
What they do to, for example, a simple post is as follows:
<div class="post">
<div class="post_body">
Post Header
<div class="entry">
<div class="entry_body">
Post text blah blah blah
<div id="more_text">
I'll leave out the extra div wrappers; you can imagine them all there.
<div class="post_footer">
Some links and junk go here
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
That's not an exaggeration, I don't believe; it's actually even worse than that. I just got wicked board of formatting indents with the space bar. WHICH THEY DO TO!!!!! It's because their whole system is designed to be edited in a web browser, like this post. Which suggests that they want it to be editable by people who don't know how to, I don't know, use ftp. So why do their tags look like "<$MTEntryDate format="%x %X"$>"?! I have it on good authority that dollar signs and percent signs in the same tag are very intimidating to non-programmers. They sure are to me!!
Just in case you thought I was exaggerating about the not-closing-divs-til-the-end thing, I present you a real-life example from a template I happened to have up in my other browser window. It's the end of the master archive template, if you're keeping score at home.
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Really. Could that possibly be a fragment of semantic markup? The answer, is no.