So, I have been seeing this more and more. I see the term “Web Developer” being applied to anybody that can do basic HTML5 and CSS scripting. Even worse, I see the term being applied to people that do not know enough to understand how the back end works, or cannot even spell LAMP.
If you can do your job just using Notepad and Chrome (i.e. no compiler), with no back end services, you are just a “scripter.” Just make peace with that, and stop trivializing what real developers do. And no, you are not writing a “web app,” you are scripting web pages (although maybe for someone else’s actual app). Does PHP executing DB queries count? Maybe – if you also (properly) designed the database it is working with.