The good old css argument, the trouble is that people forget about the whole point of a website and care more about how good their code is / isnt / could be / might be. The average person on the web looking at sites doesnt have a clue about any of that they just care that the site is user friendly and as long as it looks good the code doesnt matter.

I guess the argument is that it will load point something of a second quicker but these days with the majority of people having broadband 'sloppy' website design doesnt have a detremental effect on performace in the slightest. A couple of extra lines of code here and there isnt going to matter to the person looking at the site. As long as the site works and is cross browser compatible then surely there must be something more important to worry about!

My opinion on this has changed considerably over the past few years with broadband becoming widespread and webservers being so good, there is no longer the need to keep code to a minimum and worry about doing something the long way instead of the efficient way.

If you are someone who is a code perfectionist (i know several!) then if you really want a challenge then go into mobile phone programming as you will make a lot of money! They have so little processing power and you have to think that for every instruction you are using battery power. People who program mobile phones are frankly amazing and they have a real purpose for making code the very best it can be because of the situation they are faced with. I dont think this is the case any more on the web.