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I'd say that your HTML prototype acted as your wire frame. It does seem to have guided the engineers hand. Nothing wrong with that though. I tend to do a similar process a lot on my own projects. Being solo, and not much of a designer, I'm anxious to jump into the HTML/CSS/backend process. Then when I'm done, I'll call in a designer to "make it pretty", and they'll usually follow a similar layout.

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The important step I think here is that the developer not used the initial HTML prototype as a template when building the application. He just looked at it and produced code that output code who have a similar visual appearance but probably with different HTML structure who work well with the code.

If the code was written just to fill some holes in the original prototype, basically replacing some hard-coded strings, the developer would have less liberty on how to code lending to something less efficient and less elegant.

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