Frontend Friday: What do you do?
This is something that I’ve been wondering about for quite a while now: What constitutes “web development”, and what exactly are we called? The definition for this, ah, way of life/subset of tasks seems to differ from culture to culture, even from person to person.
I’ve come across the following, all on the subject of “web development”:
- everything to do with how information is presented to the user; built up of HTML, CSS, images (spriting etc), and presentational JavaScript; or
- everything that’s rendered client-side, which is all HTML, CSS, images, and all JavaScript, or
- everything to do with how and what information is presented to the user; build up of HTML, CSS, images, JavaScript, and PHP that’s served to a browser
- everything that has to do with the web: HTML, CSS, images, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, web servers, etc.
Even though the web has been here for a while already, there seems to be a lot of differences between how we (who work on the web) are called, and what is expected of us. Personally I’ve always viewed web development as a mix of the last two options, basing on the phrase, “I develop for the web”. The lines blur especially when we’re talking about JavaScript and PHP. Both are programming languages, and might fall in the realm of software developers more.
As someone who works (be it as full-time work, freelance, or as a hobby) on the web, what do you consider part of what you do? Let me know in the comments!