@RbnJrg - I knew I could count on you for some decent outlier cases!!
Now, I'm curious in the case of the <p> margins not being honored, does that mean that even if you wrap them in a div (with margins), no margins will be reflected? Or simply that margin attributes directly at the <p> level aren't honored. Does this wonkiness extend to blockquotes?
@JSWolf - Yeah, I'd be curious to know who is the criminal responsible for this, too. Frankly, the books I've seen with this not only are guilty of the div/span coding, but also the css is usually ridiculously bloated. Like, multiple classes that are different from eachother only in the most marginal sense—think "margin: 0 1px;" vs "margin 0 2px;" or "font-size: 1.0em;" vs "font-size: 1.00012583em". In retrospect, those ridiculous decimals should have been a dead giveaway that it was a program, not a person. (although the designer presumably WAS a person, and deserves a jail sentence)