title: Removing Magento blocks through xml or phtml
body: <p>I am starting out in magento theme development and have coded my local.xml to removed 2 blocks below.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;
  &lt;layout version="0.1.0"&gt;
      &lt;default&gt;
          &lt;reference name="header"&gt;
              &lt;remove name="currency" /&gt;&lt;!--removes currency selector--&gt; 
              &lt;remove name="store_language" /&gt;&lt;!--removes store language --&gt; 
          &lt;/reference&gt;
      &lt;/default&gt;
  &lt;/layout&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This works but the template header.phtml has the block wrapped in divs that are now not needed. See below:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;div class="header-language-background"&gt;
      &lt;div class="header-language-container"&gt;
          &lt;div class="store-language-container"&gt;
              &lt;?php echo $this-&gt;getChildHtml('store_language') ?&gt;
          &lt;/div&gt;
  
          &lt;?php echo $this-&gt;getChildHtml('currency_switcher') ?&gt;
  
          &lt;p class="welcome-msg"&gt;&lt;?php echo $this-&gt;getChildHtml('welcome') ?&gt; &lt;?php echo $this-&gt;getAdditionalHtml() ?&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
      &lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My question is can I just remove the section from the template file instead of removing the block? Will this effect anything if the blocks are in the xml files but not being called up in any template phtml files?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks :)</p>