Great overview of an old & ongoing debate from Richard Rutter over at clagnut.com

All started from a little tweet:
Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse. – elliotjaystocks
Personally I never touch code of any flavor, but I don’t believe this makes me a bad designer. I do have a good understanding of what is/isn’t achievable code-wise, this comes from working with some great developers. Only when working as a member of a team of experts do you achieve a great result. You can be good at many things, but it better to be great at one thing.
Now it’s worth going over to Elliot’s site to read the full article he’s written about his tweet as he explains his reasoning very well.