yah, to me, spacers and extra non-semantic elements smell like a hack, so i try to refactor those out. sometimes you can't do that with the current state of css (which thankfully is now changing, albeit still slowly), but most of the time, it's possible to remove those extraneous elements.
That’s my point, I used to think the same. The thing is, there is no difference from the machine’s perspective, and you’d have to consider every mobile app a “hack” by that measure since this approach is how native UIs are built. You can reap the benefits of faster development and more straightforward code without giving up anything on performance, accessibility, etc.
it's not faster or more straightforward though. you still have to grok and hack it, so might as well grok and hack it cleanly rather than adding superfluous elements (especially considering accessibility, which is a whole espteric can of worms).
