For me, a front-end developer fulfills the role of the "glue" between the designer and the back-end developer.
Accordingly, the FE developer needs a high-level understanding of both the designer and BE developer's skills. In the real world the FE developer may get his/her hands dirty with a bit of both as well as FE stuff. According to Mike Davies (front-end developer at Yahoo! and Ex technical lead developer for Legal & General) at the WSG London meeting in February explained that the poor performance of L&G's site in no small part stemmed from developers wanting to move on up the ladder from FE development to the "serious stuff" of BE development. Consequently, no one was an expert in FE development (web standards and accessibility) and as a result their website's economic performance suffered greatly. The point he made was that developers, in general, don't want to specialise in FE development, because they can earn more doing the BE stuff. What L&G discovered was that by doing a decent FE job it greatly improved their ROI. Listen to his account of the L&G process here: http://muffinresearch.co.uk/wsg/audio/07/02/28/mike.mp3 Mike said after the L&G project he made a deliberate decision to specialise in FE development, and took on the Yahoo job to do just that. Personally, I think designers, FE and BE developers need to accept and appreciate the other disciplines and stop being so precious about their own set of skills - team work guys. :) On a practical note, general qualifications can give a broad knowledge of the different areas, but we all need to specialise, which is where CPD comes into play. And that's where I see the dutch having made a bold/couragous move in doing what they've started. Let's observe and learn. Richard Williams No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.476 / Virus Database: 269.10.0/887 - Release Date: 05/07/2007 13:55 ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
