Following up on my last post (Standards don't necessarily have anything to do with being semantically correct), here's some further discussion on the issue:

This Validates!
On Standards and Semantics
Semantics and Bad Code
Semantic Markup

And Dan Cederholm takes a tentative first step toward the creation of a Am I the Semantic Web or Not? site with his first SimpleQuiz, the objective of which is to "ask some questions about markup and generate some discussion about preferred methods".