[ryanbrunner]

In my experience, really trying to be semantic ends up requiring gargantuan leaps of creativity trying to come up with semantic meaning for elements that are there purely for presentational reasons (wrapper classes, clearfixes, etc.)

[spellboots]

It is certainly hard, and impossible in some cases. But not as many as you would think. Wrappers can be a problem (although not as much as they used to be). Clearfix is not a problem at all, as it does not require an element only a css mixin[1]

Still, it's very possible to be almost entirely semantic with a few minor exceptions using a css preprocessor.

[1] http://compass-style.org/reference/compass/utilities/general...