Honestly I don't think web developers will ever be respected, even if every other type of developer disappears from the face of the Earth. That's because of:

Honestly I don't think web developers will ever be respected, even if every other type of developer disappears from the face of the Earth. That's because of: * an over-inflated sense of importance (see the comparison with the moon landing) * aggressiveness (see the endless statements about killing the desktop, mobile, etc) * low barrier to entry and high population numbers to entry resulting in lots of ignorance * attention deficit (see the endless churn in frameworks, libraries, solutions) * and poor technical craftsmanship (at the end of the day, the solutions offered have poor performance and poor platform integration). This is justified by the fact that these poor technologies are making webdevs more productive. Not all of the above apply to back-end webdev, those devs are more relaxed. Unfortunately they're being assimilated by the front-end.