Today I was reading around in a forum whenI came across a post of someone claiming to be a web developer.  Whatstruck me as odd was that the person making the claim was looking for afreelance developer to help him with his website.  That is not the partthat struck me as odd,  he then stated that he did not know JavaScript,Flash, PHP, or any server side language.  How I took this was that thekid knew HTML and that was all.  Yes, it is true that knowing HTML orxHTML is definitely one of the most important parts of web developmentit is by no means the be all end all of web development.

I know that it may seem harsh, but to tell you the truth it isactually quite insulting to hear someone that only knows how to mark upa document call himself a web developer.  The developer part of thename insinuates that he knows how to program.  HTML is not programming,it is just structuring  a page to look a certain way.  All of thefunctionality that we have come so accustomed to is actually the resultof a programmer using some sort of client side or server side scriptinglanguage like JavaScript, PHP, or ASP.NET.  The difference might soundquite subtle, but in reality it is like night and day.  My point isthis,  if you truly want to call yourself a web developer, and not justa web designer, don’t stop on HTML.  There is so much more to the worldof programming, and web development then just marking up a document. Study hard, read a lot, code a lot, always seek to keep learning andthen you can be a true developer.