[jwdunne]

I also have a few questions to ask which supports separation of content and presentation:

Have you ever worked on a project that used inline styles on almost ever paragraph or heading? If yes, you will instantly know much of a pain it is. If you've ever transferred said content to a totally different design you should be scarred by this experience.

Have you also tried adding a page to a website that uses a table-based layout (the prime example of presentational HTML)? When a modern design is fit onto one of these layouts, adding content becomes a really painful experience.

I can see first hand the benefits of good separation.

[talmand]

I can attest to this. As a client-side developer I can go into detail of how much pain is involved in changing the skin on a site when the original developers did not structure their HTML well, including inline styles all over the place. Plus in many cases it seemed the developers had no idea how HTML actually works creating pages that will never validate causing all kinds of weird side issues from browser to browser.

I have CSS selectors that go five to six levels deep because of tables contained in tables contained in tables with no classes or ids on any elements. Often times those tables in tables is totally unnecessary.

Div > span > table > tr > span > td > span > div

That's not the way to build a web page. My guess? They used Visual Studio for layout as if they were coding a desktop application.