Ok, that’s fine, it’s difficult to understand, but if you think about it it’s necessary to make the layout work correctly:
The full explanation is in this thread: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=693766
Without this CSS, Chrome and Firefox will still helpfully fudge the layout engine to make things work ok, while other browsers (e.g. IE7) aren’t so helpful and stick to the exact specification of how the layout should work (i.e. this is NOT an IE7 bug).
In any case, this is not an example of your assertion that I am not correctly separating content from presentation: it’s just difficult CSS.
??? This is standard semantic markup: the purpose of those divs is to group content together into independent sections.
Your divs on the other hand group content into two meaningless columns: you have thrown away the meaning of the markup and instead used an implementation which suits the chosen layout.
This is not separation of content from presentation, but some sort of misguided “optimisation” of the markup to suit a particular layout.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be operating under the serious misconception that best practice is to only use tags which are absolutely necessary to achieve the desired layout.
On the contrary, best practice is not even think about the layout: first mark up the content Meaningfully and THEN think about how you lay it out. This results in readable, maintainable code.
Of course, content should only be marked up with the bare minimum of code required to make it meaningful (and no more).