Subject: IPP> Re: New IPP Scheme

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1998 17:13:56 -0400

>> It seems to me there are few if any clear, overwhelming technical merits
on
>> either side of the proposals.  The printing community is firm on how it
>> believes customers and users will perceive and use IPP and believes
"ipp:"
>> is not the right approach.  Since other than encoded within the
>> application/ipp body, "ipp:" is never on the wire, there is no real
>> difference from the network's infrastructure
>
>That's not true.  ipp: would appear "on the wire" in all sorts of
>places -- in HTML documents, LDAP responses, ACAP responses, etc. --
>any time someone needs to refer to a printer.
>
>Keith

Yes, but in all these cases, a human being does not see this raw material.
It is technically irrelevant whether the responses say "ipp:", "http:", or
anything else for that matter.  My argue stands, the right people to deal
with the user's perception are the people shipping the products and they
have reach consensus that "ipp:" is the wrong answer.

One of the major scenarios this group continues to discuss is what does the
naive person do with a URL received from another individual?  It is a
common belief among those of us developing products that they will stick
them in a browser and see what happens.  With "ipp:", nothing will happen
except the browser complaining.  We firmly believe that well designed IPP
servers when presented with a GET operation at its HTTP URL will return
something of significance and use to the person trying it out.
Specifically, we expect the server to return an HTML page that will help
the user "bootstrap" themselves into being able to print to that printer.
That scenario is completely broken with the "ipp:" scheme.  If we don't do
our work to enable IPP to work for those who have only minimal experience
then we have done no one (especially ourselves) a favor.

**********************************************
* Don Wright                 [email-masked] *
* Product Manager, Strategic Alliances       *
* Lexmark International                      *
* 740 New Circle Rd                          *
* Lexington, Ky 40550                        *
* 606-232-4808 (phone) 606-232-6740 (fax)    *
**********************************************

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1998 18:24:44 -0400

> >> on either side of the proposals.  The printing community is firm on how it
> >> "ipp:" is not the right approach.  Since other than encoded within the
> anything else for that matter.  

No, that's not true either.  People deal with these things all the time.
People explicitly type URLs into web pages, into their directory entries,
etc.  People will type printer URLs into dialog boxes and printcap files.
This stuff doesn't just appear out of thin air.

> My argue stands, the right people to deal

The folks who are shipping printers aren't even close to representative
of the people who are going to be using this stuff.  

> then we have done no one (especially ourselves) a favor.

No, ipp: doesn't prevent that at all.  If someone wants to put up a web
page with an http: URL that tells someone how to bootstrap a connection
to their ipp: printer, and if they want to export that http: URL in HTML 
documents and directory entries and so forth, they're quite welcome to 
do so -- nobody can stop them.  The same is true for any printer vendor
that wants to build this functionality into its printers.

But if IPP gets to overload the http: URL, then you're *forcing* the user
to go through such a mechanism, because he has no other way to know that
he's talking to a printer.  And you're somehow expecting that in
every case doing a GET on the http: URL is going to return something
reasonable that lets the user configure that printer on his system.
This is putting the functionality in the wrong place, because it
expects that the server knows what the user needs to do.  That just 
doesn't fly in a heterogeneous world.    If you use ipp: the client
will realize that the other end is a printer, and it will (eventually)
know what to do with it.

Keith

---

From: Scott Lawrence <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 12:20:41 +0000

> anything else for that matter. 

Without taking sides on this debate, it is worth pointing out that the early
developers of the web all thought that ordinary users would never deal
directly with URLs at all - only HTML authors would ever see them.  We all
see them every day in mail, TV, newspapers, billboards...

-- 
Scott Lawrence            Consulting Engineer        <[email-masked]>
Agranat Systems, Inc.   Embedded Web Technology     http://www.agranat.com/