brainflak.com

I keep coming up against the widely held belief that Web design can be done by monkeys. Aside from bruising the egos of folks like me, this has an unfortunate corollary: if you have something that needs doing that’s appropriate for a monkey to do, make the Web designer do it.

I’m not complaining, really, since I’m content to do a fairly large amount of monkey-work as long as I get to do more interesting things as well, but it is a bit vexing.

It really is a matter of ego, I suppose. When my boss, a very knowledgeable Cold Fusion developer, saw the two Eric Meyer On CSS books in my cubicle, he laughed, expressing sincere bafflement. “How can there be two books on CSS?” he wondered. He clearly thinks that what he knows about using CSS to specify font sizes and colors is all there is to it. My li’l ego bristles at this assumption.

Every ASP developer I interview thinks that he knows all there is to know about HTML and CSS even though they don’t know about the <label> and <th> tags or the difference between margin and padding in CSS, much less about hacks to get around the quirks of the Internet Explorer box model, or the pros and cons of various image replacement techniques.

I don’t quiz them ruthlessly (unless they annoy me :-] ), nor did I point out my boss’ knowledge gaps to him, but it is funny that the skills I’ve worked hard to develop to a high level are considered meaning-/worthless by the people with whom I work, while my rudimentary knowledge of C# or the simplistic things I do with SQL earn more respect.

Can this perception be remedied? Should it? It can’t be conducive to Web designers earning the salaries they ought to, so I’d have to say “yes” to that last question. I suppose the thing to do is to educate folks about the issues behind various technical choices in our markup, scripting, etc. As much as they’ll put up with. :-]