I was surprised by the debate today about whether attributes
themselves could be registered like type2enums.
I found the following sentence in Section 6 Conformance,
page 62, lines 1585-1591:
IPP is explicitly designed to be extensible. Additional attributes can be
proposed to be registered by going through the type 2 enum process which
will register their specification after approval with IANA. In addition
specific implementation instances may support not only the basic protocol as
defined in this specification, but may add vendor-specific private
extensions by prefixing attribute-names with their company name registered
with IANA for use in domains. See attribute syntax section. However, such
private extensions shall not duplicate attribute semantics already in this
specification.
Open issue 22, seeks to move this part of the conformance section
up front, since it is such an important feature of IPP and is
what will prevent the disaster with LPR/LPD that every manufacturer
extended it in different uncontrolled ways. We need to show the
IETF that we have a solution.
We must do issue 22 for the Internet-Draft so that the readers
will see it.
Thanks,
Tom