Nobobody wants to be THAT guy

Yesterday Jeff Atwood quoted some excerpts from Michael Braude's post Why I’ll Never Be A ‘Web Guy’ on his blog.
Of course it led to some flame wars about the question whether being a web programmer means to be a bad programmer or stupid programmer or anything else.
I must say that I completely disagree with Michael Braude's post. Especially with the hypothesis that web programmers are worse than desktop programmers. I cannot see the line that is between web and desktop programmers. Are there any big apps that don't connect with webservices or don't get any resources from the web?
Well, maybe I misunderstood Michael's post because in one of his comments he says:

I don't consider server-side programming "web programming" because SOA encompasses all mediums. Once you get into writing web services and DAL's you've left the world of aggravation.

So what the hell is he talking about? About creating simple html pages? Writing some javascripts?
In a company where I worked previously there was position called HTML programmer. We were making some jokes about it, because we, backend developers - "the real programmers" - didn't consider html to be a programming language. Due to popularity of XHTML we said the position name should be changed to XHTML programmer, however one of the HTML programmers left the job before the renaming took place and was claimed to be first ex-HTML programmer ;)
I must say that I really liked this distinction. I never had to deal with CSS or divs or anything. I just prepared some basic html (mostly including table layouts ;)) and then the template went to HTML guy and he prepared some decent looking webpage.
I always thought that HTML / javascript guys were not real programmers. They often didn't know how to program but they were never responsible for application logic. I never wanted to be a HTML guy and I never was. However, I would never say that they are better or worse than backend programmers. The reason why they wrote HTML was because they liked it, they chose this job, not because they weren't smart enough - they just had different skills.
I know good and bad html programmers. I think that writing good html and css requires lots of skill and I appreciate their work.
I don't consider c# / php guys smarter than html guys. On the other hand, I do think that being frontend developer is far less demanding that being backend developer. But that's just my opinion. If I say that being windows administrator is far easier than being unix administrator, I am not saying that windows administrators are dumber that unix guys. And if I needed windows administrator I would hire one. I would not hire unix administrator for this position because I think that his previous job was more challenging.
The problem with Michael Braude's post is that he somehow says that html programmers are inferior to backend developers. I am also considering their JOB inferior but I don't consider THEM inferior. Still, that's only my personal view on job market and it also reflects my ambitions and aims in my career as a developer.
The last remark is that people who use easier tools aren't dumber than people using the tools that are harder to maintain. What is more, maybe they choose better technologies and more powerful toys and in this way they are far smarter than people who think are intelligent enough to reinvent the wheel from scratch.