Design Coding....rap
To answer your question about <p>, yes for styling text different than declared in css for <body>..don't wanna overdo the amount of divs. A DIV is an empty element, meaning you will still have to use <p></p> tags etc. inside them.
Edit: looking at what you are using it for, why don't you use a table with classes set on the <td>? Nobody says you can't use a table inside a div. You can style <td> etc in CSS (stylesheet) too.
Here's an example on howto with the stylesheet (pabox stylesheet):
code:
/*
paBox 2.0 Style: Default Grey and White
Created by Todd: http://www.phparena.net
*/
BODY {
/*Basic formatting: background color, text font, size and color.*/
background: #FFFFFF;
font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 10px;
color: #000000;
}
TD.main {
/*Color of the bottom of the shoutbox: where the add new shout area is*/
background: #FFFFFF;
color: #000000;
}
TD.row1 {
/*paBox uses alternating rows when displaying shouts. This is the background and text color of the first row*/
background: #AAAAAA;
color: #000000;
}
TD.row2 {
/*Text and bg color of second row*/
background: #CCCCCC;
color: #000000;
}
TD.border {
/*This is the color of the table border. For thin, 1px borders, paBox uses a table within a table, so although this says background, it really controls the border color*/
background: #000000;
}
A:LINK, A:VISITED, A:ACTIVE {
/*Attributes for links, active links, and visited links*/
font-family : Tahoma, Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size : 10px;
color : #555555;
text-decoration: underline;
}
A:HOVER {
/*Make some uber-cool hover effects right here*/
font-family : Tahoma, Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size : 10px;
color : #DDDDDD;
text-decoration : underline;
}
/ 
