It's not necessarily either/or, in my mind. OS support is paramount so good
thing we have Microsoft, Novell, Apple and IBM on the team! They will provide
the infrastructure upon which integrated clients may be developed. Also, there
will be clients which evolve as elements of higher order print and print
management software solutions, I'm sure. But none of this precludes the
possibility of recognition by generic web clients or commonplace web
infrastructure (i.e. Netscape as you put it).
Today, (for example) if I'm checking the weather in Boulder at
http://www.atd.ucar.edu/cgi-bin/flabweatherE and I want to contact the weather
station manager, placing my cursor over his e-mail link results in the URL
mailto:cook at atd.edu in my browser command line. When I click, my mail
composition client (of choice) is launched and Mr. Cook's address is
automatically filled out for me. There is no reason why, tomorrow, I couldn't
(hope to) be viewing a white paper on the WEB which has a "printto", "print" or
"ipp" link that behaves in a similar manner whereby clicking invokes the native
IPP client, or client of choice, merrily helping me launch my print job