I think the larger problem is that the "web" is maturing and as such, clear delineations of roles are forming just as they have in other areas of developers. Le

I think the larger problem is that the "web" is maturing and as such, clear delineations of roles are forming just as they have in other areas of developers. Lets take for example game development. You have your physics developers, you engine developers, your level developers, level designers, and artists (I am skipping a bunch of other diciplins but for brevity this will do). Anyways, back it the old days it used to be a 2 man show, usually an artist and a developer and they would knock out a game. As the industry matured and the technology involved became more complex specialization occurred. The same thing is now taking place in the web and we are seeing the technology start to converge around the idea of specialization. SOA and REST has compartmentalized the server side into addressable business resources for performing business computation and access to data. Used correctly a business developers can provide information and processing to the internet without having to touch a single line of HTML or JavaScript. They can write services in pure Java, C#, Python or whatever. This allows a Java developers the ability to provide deep specialization in Java and provide the products of the specialization to other developers in the work flow without encumbering that Java developers with ancillary technologies. Further many app servers externalize the management of environmental resources such as file access, which becomes the domain of an infrastructure admin. Server administration and configuration can now be performed by technical personnel that specialize in infrastructure related concerns rather than developmental concerns. This is a good thing because it allows more capacity from developers by freeing them up to develop. Finally, the client side frameworks have finally liberated the UI from the Hodge-podge of technology soup that we created in ASP, PHP, JSP, whateverP. This in my opinion is where the web went wrong. We created the idea of the documents that just souped all of the technologies together and everyone from all distinct roles had to work in this mix. While it was great for the one man show developer the whateverP where always trading of ease of use for the developer for ease of use for the designer or vice-verse. One only needs to look at the contrast between PHP and JSP to see the two distinct philosophies at work. So as the web has matured you are now seeing more delineated roles than the old web developer or web master or web guy. Now you see delineations like, SOA/REST developers, Content Manager, SEO Developer, Web Designer, UI Developer. There are companies like Wavemaker that are trying to make it easy for the one man show developers to write modern web application and I believe that products such as it will grow in popularity as the solo developers looks for tools to keep up, but the reality is that the web has matured and with maturity comes complexity. Complexity that is more and more managed by groups of specialist as opposed to the generalist.