Daily Pioneer News

PLATTEVILLE - University of Wisconsin-Platteville World Wide Web Coordinator Daniel Frommelt has recently published an article on the famed website, A List Apart. Frommelt's article discusses the concept of web standards, which ensures web pages work correctly regardless of the device displaying them. This is not a new concept to UWP however, because web developers on campus have been developing and refining the university's system over the past few years. With this modernization, UWP has the capability to serve all types of browsers.

After a meeting with other UW System webmasters, Frommelt chose Slashdot as the site to rework with web standards because it was, "neutral territory and similar to CNN for IT folks." On July 22, the site was "frozen" by Frommelt and UWP student Sebastian Sholl. In the following two days it was "gutted, ripped apart, and rebuilt with web standards," said Frommelt. None of the data on the site was changed or modified, only the code it is based on. On July 28 and 29, Sholl and Frommelt presented their findings at a web developer conference in Fond du Lac, Wis.

While speaking at Webdev Share, the National Webmaster's Conference in Indiana this fall, Frommelt and UWP student Sean Sieg had the opportunity to speak with Jeffrey Zeldman, author of A List Apart; the online magazine for web developers. At this meeting Frommelt was asked to write an article about the research to be published on Zeldman's site. Part I of the article was posted Nov. 21 and is entitled, Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards. (Part II will be released in the next week or so.)

On Nov. 22, one day after the article appeared on A List Apart, the article also appeared on Slashdot. Since this time, 763 comments have been posted in response to Frommelt's article. "The number of people who've read the page is amazing. Even Slashdot, the site rebuilt, recognized and acknowledged the article by listing the suggested changes on their website," Frommelt enthusiastically commented. The article is so popular it has already been translated into Spanish and Swedish. When one goes to a search engine such as Google, and types in the article title, approximately 4,800 links are brought up.

The best part about the entire experience and research is that it benefits as a training base for other schools, not only UWP. Frommelt stated, "There are mutual benefits; the article is not just for presentation purposes." At first web developers were skeptical on how the IT community would receive the new ideas because they challenged the ways web development had occurred in the past. So far, there have been mostly positive comments. "It's been a wild ride . . . and it's still going," said Frommelt.

If you are interested in reading his article, it can be found at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot/. To view the Slashdot web page go to http://www.slashdot.org/.