IPP Mail Archive: IPP> Re: What is it we really need?

IPP> Re: What is it we really need?

Keith Moore (moore@cs.utk.edu)
Mon, 06 Jan 1997 20:36:51 -0500

> Right, and we have base OS, NOS, and browser people on our committee
> (Sun, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Netscape, etc.). Which is why I think we
> are ahead of the game if we have the right folks already on the committee.
> If we do a good job with this, the decision on whether or not to include
> IPP on a particular platform will hopefully be moot, since we also have
> roughly 98% of the printer vendor market represented within the PWG. The
> OS vendors might not have much choice.

Wide industry support is no guarantee of success. The trade rags bear
witness: dozens of standards efforts, each with apparently wide industry
representation, many of which fail miserably.
(neither is the IETF impramatur any assurance of adoption)

If you want the protocol to succeed, make sure you:

a. solve a problem that needs solving. if you're going to re-invent
the wheel (which you are), make sure the result is obviously much
better *to users* than the old wheel.
b. facilitate products that are easy to configure (on both client
and server ends) and use.
c. write a protocol spec that will implemented consistently from one
platform to another, so that arbitrary clients interoperate with
arbitrary servers
d. make sure the protocol works reliably
e. don't significantly increase the cost of the product.

Keith