The civil war between designers and developers shifts to developers

I’ve long viewed web development as a shifting balance of power between graphic designers and software developers.   A rough timeline would go something like this

• In the beginning: web creators used text and html, Advantage Developers
• 1997 – People discover html tables, allowing precise graphic placement.  Placement allowed graphic designers to go nuts with Photoshop – Advantage Designers
• 1998 – ASP, Perl and PHP come about, allowing developers to make content decisions – Advantage Developers
• 2000 – Flash gets easy enough to use – Advantage Designers
• 2005 – Browser standards and search engines become competant, which makes the actual code matter – Advantage Developers
• 2008 – Tools like TypePad, WordPress, and JQuery automate Javascript, SEO and CSS standardization, which had been a huge part of what developers did on a day to day basis.  The automation allows emphasis to shift to the look and feel – Advantage Designers
• 2010 – Html 5 arrives (sort of), making the web much more of an application!  – Advantage Developers

I haven’t had much time to research Html 5, but I’m impressed so far.  It’s not a sea change from anything that exists now, but Html 5 is an impressive refinement of existing technology.

photo credit: B.K. Ragsdale

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

 

Written By Steve French

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 at 8:27 pmand is filed under Biz, Software Development . You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

3 responses to “The civil war between designers and developers shifts to developers”

1. lmao nice story dude.

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2. dang amazing story man.

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3. great post as usual!

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