We’re not suggesting the Internet is dead, but with the proliferation of easy-to-use WYSIWYG HTML editors enabling non-techies to set up blogs and Web pages, Web site development is no longer a black art. Sure, there’s still a need for professional Web developers, but a good grasp of HTML isn’t the only skill required of a Web developer. Professional developers often have expertise in Java, AJAX, C++, and .NET, among other programming languages. HTML as a skill lost more than 40% of its value between 2001 and 2003, according to Foote Partners.
Yes web development is a comprehensive affair that requires a diverse skill-set, but one can't be a serious developer without being proficient with HTML.
HTML is the grandchild of GML which I used in conjunction with COBOL to produce every document that was issued by an insurance company worked for many years ago.
HTML is there, but it is far low on the skill set for the designer, and it’ll be hard getting a job with that as your main skill. You don’t do that much with it these days, as it is mostly a container for CSS and JavaScript.
Exactly, at the end of the day, all of these web frameworks’ only job is to ultimately generate HTML and Javascript.
I have switched to using Apache Wicket for web development. It’s great! No more embedded scriptlets, or tons of XML configuration. Just plain HTML and Java backing classes. I can use any HTML editor to design the look and feel with CSS.
I know a lot of JSP programmers that know very little HTML. I'm one of the best HTML/CSS coders in the country and it boggles my mind how little they know. It's like their education consisted of JAVA only. That said, no one will ever design a top notch scalable site in a WYSIWYG editor alone. I use Dreamweaver quite a bit, but mostly to find my place in the code. I like the text editor in DW and find it very inefficient and darn stupid to run DW and a separate text editor.