I know exactly what you mean - a common theme through my book is "let's separate the content from the logic", and in many places (especially with JSPs), I talk about the typical divide in a J2EE Web development team between the
Java programmers and the page designers. Personally, I much prefer to fiddle with the processing logic and databases than with the front-end and graphics.
As far as I know there is no exam which covers servlets and EJBs together (let alone JDBC etc. as well), with the exception of the Architect exam, of course. IBM do a few J2EE certifications which, I think, are primarily intended to
test J2EE knowledge as it pertains to WebSphere or the Rational products.
However, the vast majority of the SCWCD is about programming Web applications and not about presentation like (X)HTML. No exam questions I've ever encountered have had anything wrong with their presentation - for the most part their HTML tags etc. are very simple (and usually quite old, like <b> and <i>
. It would be unfair to test (X)HTML in an exam which doesn't list it as an objective. This is particularly the case when all the browsers are in a mess, some understanding DOCTYPE, older ones not; others can support XHTML 1.1 or 2.0, others not etc. The only thing worse than the state of (X)HTML is JavaScript...
