Can someone tell me what the point of this tag is? I'm reading a book on HTML/CSS and it is briefly mentioned but from what I've seen it seems pretty useless. What do you guys think?

It does seem pretty useless. I guess you could take advantage of it with css.

It's for 508 Accesibility. When properly used it just adds a discription of all visible input tags.

<label for="name">Name:<input type="text" name="name" /></label>

If you didn't use it your page will still display and function properly but you wouldn't be 508 compliant.

Cheers,

thanks for the replies. What exactly is 508 Accesibility? I know it has something to do with browsers for the disabled, but who requires requires it on their sites (government maybe?)

Not necessarily just the government. Many businesses are striving to make their sites "508 compliant" in order to attract more business by making them accessible to the disabled. The more potential customers you can communicate to, the more you will attract.

Hello,

Here is a little more information on 508 accesibillitie. 508 might not seem very practical to the designer, in fact trying to implement it might seem more like a headache. However, with a little creative thinking, all these compliance issues can be meet with out ruining your design. like Kyrnt said, the more you can communicate with, the more you will.

Cheers,

It's also good if you are using options in a form (see example http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_label.asp)
This allows you to click on the label and change the option and not just click on the button itself.