1) current proposal: The way proposed in the current document where the
job and all document data is a part of a HTTP single entity-body.
2) my proposal: A job is an HTTP document whose top level content type
is multipart/mixed (an existing type) or perhaps multipart/ipp (a new
type and probably a bad idea). In either case, the first entity has a
content type of application/ippjob and contains the job attributes.
Each remaining entity contains a document and they are all standard
MIME types, such as application/PostScript or text/plain. Such a
document could in the future become a multipart/ippdocument with a
document attribute entity and a document content entity if a document
has attribute overrides. The document data entity could also have a
content-type of multipart/alternative (an existing type) if a client
wanted to have several representations of a document, e.g. HTTP and PDF
and a printer supported such.
The advantage of my proposal is that the document parts are
conventional MIME documents which any software could read. Only the
application/ippjob and application/ippdocument require special software
to process.
I hope others will comment on the pros and cons of these two proposals?
Bob Herriot