If you don’t put padding on the mainwrapper you won’t achieve equal margins between all the elements. The alternative to not using mainwrapper would be to manually change the margins of the elements on the edges.

Example:

#1 { margin-top: 8px }
#2 { margin-left: 8px }
#3 { margin-right: 8px }
#2, 3 { margin-bottom: 8px }

While that definitely works, it’s definitely less practical the more complex your layout becomes.

This article describes the problem which made me decide not to include gutters on my grids and template. Preferring to handle the spacing on the content elements or a nested div inside left col.

Do you really need padding on mainwrapper? Could you set it to be slightly narrower?

Nice article, thanks for coming to my talk!

Cheers,
Nicole