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Comment by kmfrk | Hacker News Reader

90% of webdesign is dealing with errant behaviour.

It's why it's so frustrating when people treat front-end design with disdain as something trivially easy. Of course, if you only decide to serve the newest version of Chrome and Safari, it can be easy to remember that there people out their who don't - or can't use them.

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> webdesign

It's web development you're referring to.

Without wishing to descend too much into semantics the accepted definitions (at least within the industry) seem to be that "design" is basically Graphics/Layout (so includes HTML/CSS) and development is programming (either client or server side).

I don't agree. Design is design, development is split into front- and back-end specialisations. Some developers straddle both, but there are few people who are both (good) designers and developers. I don't know of anybody within the industry who would refer to a front-end developer as a "designer."

It depends if you are programming or simply describing page layout. Front end development could also include things like Javascript. There are plenty of designers who are not Javascript programmers but who can use CSS etc.

HTML and CSS are programming.

You could probably argue that in a technical sense but it's a person who works with HTML/CSS but not say JS etc would probably be considered a designer more than a programmer.

I've worked at a bunch of different companies (Yahoo!, The Guardian, various smaller companies) and in all of them the "designers" were the people who did the visual design using Photoshop and Illustrator - those people rarely if ever wrote HTML and CSS, and almost never to production level standards.

The people writing production-ready HTML and CSS were known as "web developers" or "client-side/front-end engineers".

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