I‘ve just seen another job spec posted on line for a web developer job. It is supposedly for a developer, and yet in this advert they cite knowledge of PHP or MySQL as only being desirable, rather than required. The only required skills they do refer to are HTML and CSS.

Frankly, I think that assigning the title of developer to such a narrow role sells the profession of software development and the role of developer short by a country mile. The word developer is used to cover far too many roles. The term web developer is itself overloaded.

Let‘s look at the definition of a web developer from Wikipedia.

A web developer is a software developer or software engineer who is specifically engaged in the development of World Wide Web applications, or distributed network applications that are run over the HTTP from a web server to a web browser.

Let‘s look a little closer at what this says, ”a software developer or software engineer”. Ok, so a web developer is a software developer?

A software developer is a person or organization concerned with facets of the software development process wider than design and coding, a somewhat broader scope of computer programming or a specialty of project managing including some aspects of software product management.

Hmm… so a software developer is a big picture, multi-skilled kinda guy with a role or skills in multiple areas of the software development process. That doesn‘t sound like someone who‘ll just be interested in HTML and CSS, however challenging it is.

The age old building–a–house analogy

Would you call a plasterer an architect? Even if he was really, really good at plastering? Even if he was an absolute wizard plasterer, the best there was?

The answer is no, you wouldn‘t. You‘d give the plasterer due respect and full credit for the achievements in his profession. You may even be able to afford to hire him to plaster your house for you. You wouldn‘t dream of asking him to design it for you.

Similarly for all those HTML/CSS experts out there. Some of them are very, very good at what they do. Give them respect and due credit. Give them a job building your next site. Call them web builders or even page engineers. But don't call them developers.

Someone I know and like personally and have enormous amount of respect for professionally, Mark Boulton, is currently embroiled in quite the developer vs designer shit–storm, which he mentions in this article. Mark is bang–on in everything he says here.

However, I‘m not going to write about some developer vs designer problem. I don‘t think there is such a problem between professional designers working with professional developers who all know how to communicate effectively and are working towards a common goal. This is more a rant about bad developers, with poor attitudes, giving the profession a bad name.

It all started when Mark mentioned on Twitter the poor semantic quality of the HTML produced by a popular Drupal module. Though I haven't read all of the responses to this, I gather much of them were from developers and were of the ad homonym, personal kind, rather than a reasoned argument against Mark‘s assertion that the HTML was shit (I‘m paraphrasing there, Mark said “beyond bad”).

One of the comments made by an alleged developer in response to Mark‘s blog post included this:

I don‘t know what “semantic html” even is. When I put HTML in my modules, I try to make sure there‘s enough divs that you can do everything with CSS and that stuff makes sense but I‘m not a designer and I‘m sure a designer would look at it and groan

What the F#@%!? Any web practitioner, designer or developer with any self respect should be surprised at that statement from someone who claims to be a web developer. Semantic HTML is HTML that has meaning, it is HTML that makes sense. Adding arbitrary divs just so the CSS is easier does not make sense, it‘s just pure lazy.

Irrespective of the nature of the debate, I‘m astounded that anyone is in any way in doubt as to the virtues of the semantic web. Is this 90‘s nostalgia or something!? Aside from the obvious SEO advantages, there is enhanced accessibility, a smaller footprint and increased portability – due to the separation of content (HTML) and style (CSS).

If there is any other argument against semantic HTML that isn‘t a variation of “I can‘t be arsed”, I haven‘t heard it.