I want the contents of my div to be centered inside my div.

Just like <center> works, but vertically. You don't need <foo><bar>content</bar></foo> for horizontal centering. I consider it a layering violation to have to do that nesting.

Maybe we are misunderstanding each other, but while you don't need an "extra" container, you do need a container with some known height to vertically center the content in: http://jsfiddle.net/c20gq4pz/