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Now that I wear the programmer hat more often, I sometimes forget that I’m an accomplished HTML/CSS designer. I was pleased to learn that I rank at least a ‘level 5’ in both my HTML and CSS knowledge, according to Roger Johansson and Emil Stenstrom

Most standards aware web professionals can be found here. These people tend to think about structure and semantics first and presentation later. Strict doctypes are generally used at this level to encourage the separation of semantic and presentational markup. Whether the markup language is HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 is less important to many. In fact, some people at Level 5 are questioning the use of XHTML. Level 5 people tend to get into endless discussions about tiny markup details. They can waste hours thinking about class names or reorganizing their HTML and CSS files to make their code look pretty.

Whether you like it or not, when you’re designing web applications, you have to write a lot of html. Sometimes I work with pure-bred programmers who couldn’t write a little semantic html to save their lives. Sure, Rails lessens the burden with its templates, layouts, and helpers, but all this assistance still won’t save you from having to know what you’re doing.

HTML is the new interface language for today’s applications (does the term ‘weblication’ exist yet? or is that too lame? Definitely too lame…). And what good is HTML without CSS to make it look pretty? When you consider companies like 37Signals, it’s important to realize that a large part of their success owes not only to their penchant for making simple software, but to making simple software that looks good. What I’m saying is that It’s not just about the language or the framework—truly great web applications are a lot more than just code.