[html5] wrapper or no wrapper

[catsoul]

A developer I know says that he abandoned use of wrapper or container divs in favor of each chunk of markup being it's own piece or container for floats, and those floats are only either float left or float right, with no clears used.

He says the benefit is no items attempting to jump up and to the right, and that the use of "clear" is hack. His idea is to use a wrapper *only* if you want you content area to have a shadow around it, or a border or some kind of background image throughout.

Thoughts on this?  is "clear" a hack? has the technique of using a wrapper as overall parent over?

thanks!

cat