This is an entertaining article, as far as programming rants go. But some points were overlooked. Pablo asks, "Seriously, why can’t this person learn HTML? It’s

This is an entertaining article, as far as programming rants go. But some points were overlooked. Pablo asks, "Seriously, why can’t this person learn HTML? It’s their job to produce results, after all." Ok, fair enough to ask. Here's the answer. As a creative director, art director and designer, I deal extensively with the business case for the project, the marketing, the concept and copy writing, editing, photography, illustration, layout, information design, domain name selection, branding, and several other areas. (There are in fact many people who specialize in just one of the areas I mentioned above; and I’ll note that no one asks these specialists why they don’t know CSS.) Every one of those areas is about “producing results.” Would it be fair or reasonable to ask a programmer to learn all of the above? I don't think so. Beyond the points of fairness and reasonableness is the point that while design is about "how it works," (which is a very deep area I won't delve into at the moment) the issue of "how it looks" is also a major part of it. If the visual appearance doesn’t satisfy the requirements, no amount of CSS expertise will save the day. Furthermore, those who have expertise in making things look good (in addition to the other areas I mentioned above) often have no interest or ability in coding. In fact, they are working in a (primarily) visual discipline because they have a distaste for coding, if they’ve tried it; or simply a total lack of interest. I might point out that print design (in contrast to web design) is completely isolated from involvement with code. When I hit the “print” button, my software will generate the PostScript code for me. In this respect, the tools for print design are far ahead of those for web design. Have you ever opened up a PostScript file? I can assure you, it’s several orders of magnitude more complex than an html/css file. No one would ever ask a designer to edit the PostScript code; such a ludicrous request would be dismissed out of hand. (Although I had to do some PostScript editing many times when I worked in prepress.) Getting back to the Pablo’s question, I have to turn it around and ask: why isn’t there a “visual design” tool with the ease of, say, QuarkXPress, that can output programmer-friendly code? Serious question. While Quark can in fact output html, it’s very bad html. Likewise, one constantly hears complaints about the code generated by Dreamweaver and other tools that offer a modicum of visual editing. There’s clearly a market opportunity for software that can bring the sophistication and ease of use that print designers enjoy to the wide world of web design. (Anyone interested in exploring that market opportunity should contact me.)