Web designers, “coding” and semantics

There seems to be an awful lot of talk about whether or not a web designer necessarily needs to be able to “code” going on at the moment.

The context

Apparently, this round of the discussion was initiated by Elliot Jay Stock’s tweet:

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

Here are some subsequent blog posts:

• Web designers who can’t code
• On Designers writing HTML
• 5 Good Reasons Why Designers Should Code
• Why designers should and shouldn’t code

Semantics

As with so many discussions, it largely comes down to good old semantics; Elliot makes his general point well and explains further what he meant by his tweet in his blog post.

My own brief thoughts are as follows. If you take “web designer” to mean a person who offers a complete design, build and maintenance service (let’s say, for example, me), that person needs to know HTML and CSS for obvious reasons. If you take “web designer” to mean a design and development team member who works in broad ideas and perhaps visuals, the specifics of HTML and CSS will be far less important to their role. However, having a fundamental grasp of what web pages do (present information), how they do it (with HTML) and the kind of styling that can be applied (with CSS) will always be helpful in certain respects.

Applying semantics to our own trade

As forward-thinking web designers, we spend a lot of our time paying attention to and talking about semantics; it’s important for discussions and it’s important for publishing content and data on the web. With this in mind, now is perhaps a good time to make a little point of my own.

It seems a lot of web designers are under the notion that typing anything other than a natural language into a text editor or IDE counts as “coding”. Well it doesn’t. I cringe when I see people referring to using HTML and CSS as “coding”.

From Chambers:

verb (coded, coding) 1 to put something into a code. 2 computing to generate a set of written instructions or statements that make up a computer program.

When we use HTML to create a web page, we are annotating content using a markup language, not coding. When we use CSS to style a web page, we are describing presentation using a style sheet language, not coding. If we program using a programming language (such as Javascript), then we are coding.

Is this pedantic? I don’t think so. Keeping in mind distinctions such as this can help all those involved in the production of websites and applications, and can help us to remember to focus on what’s really important: the content that we’re publishing.