Assignment #1 Outline

Well, it's 7pm Sunday night. I'm still at home because my friend who was supposed to drive me back to school this morning decided we would just go back Monday morning in time for our 8am classes. Besides having to get up at 5:30am to get back in time, that also means I don't have all the info I need to finish my rough draft for Eng480. I haven't started making my website yet anyway, but a disk at school has most of the info I plan to put into my final web-page. I did bring my USB drive home and it has a more detailed outline of what I'm doing than my abstract did. So, I'm going to just post that here and hope it works for now. The outline doesn't include the links that will be on my website or even my complete thoughts, but I already developed them somewhere and am too frustrated to do it again. But this is a general layout off how my site is going to look-it's going to be pretty basic. So, please feel free to give me any advice at all-or tell me if I'm doing this completely wrong-or if you know any articles that would fit well with what I'm doing (I have several sites and articles already, but there's so much out there, I feel like I could easily be missing the perfect article on standards). Well, that's it for now-my parents live in the ice-age, where the internet is dial-up and uses their only phone line so every second they're yelling at me to sign-off. Believe me, I'm not at all dissapointed at not spending Thanksgiving with them this year. Read on about standards:

Outline

Explain what I am researching and why-my blog abstract says, “I want to research standards because it's such a broad topic and I would like to explore a little more about how they apply to technology like the Internet. I especially want to see how standards help a community run efficiently and then explore how those standards are developed and if standards for the Internet could be formulated in the same ways standards for "real-life" things are developed.” – So make that better and just have a short intro before going into giving information.

1) What are standards in general and how are they simular to/different then web standards?
a. first give the definition of standards and then give the specific definition I’m using in my research, dealing with standards for making a web-page
b. List a few other definitions of standards, add a link to goolge definitions, link to the wiki, link to another site on computer standards

2) Is it possible to make universal standards for something as large as the Internet?
a.A paragraph about my own thoughts
b. Links to 2 articles that imply yes, and 2 that lean towards no

3) How strict should enforcing standards be? How do you balance personal freedoms and creativey in creating websites with enforcing standards that make the site accesbile to everyone?
a.paragraph of my own thoughts-standards of some sort are needed for the internet to function at all-some standards we naturally follow, without even realizing they are standards-give examples of how standards make things more accesable
b. links to 1 or 2 articles supporting fairly strict enforcement
c. explain how some leanancy is needed in some areas-give link to articles with examples

4) How do community standards benefit that community? How would universal standards for the web benefit the internet community?
a. Give “real-world” examples about how standards in communities help them function the best- just a paragraph of examples and/or links to examples or articles
b. Parrallel how universal standards for the web benefit that community and include artcile about how standards are needed for an effective internet community

5) What are the drawbacks of enforcing standards universally?
a. Acknlowledge that though I believe standards are nessasary and should be enforced, I see problems both with the who and how of enforcing and people’s concerns with personal freedoms.-maybe mention or re-link #2 links and additional.
b. List some problems or drawbacks concerning standards

6) Conclusion
-even though there are problems with universal web-standards, I think that if they were followed by everyone, the internet would be a more productive and effective place-it can be a standard to have open source type stuff going on-explain how if standards are too controlling are strict, they will become ineffective, but general standards that exist to make the web better for the community as a whole just makes sense. – list additional links about standards that didn’t fit neatly in a specific section