-- Stephen Holmstead Hewlett Packard Internet Solutions Operation stephen_holmstead@hp.com
-----Original Message----- From: Roger K Debry [SMTP:rdebry@us.ibm.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 1997 7:55 AM To: ipp@pwg.org Subject: IPP>MOD - Print by reference
There has been quite a storm of email on the print by reference subject lately. Let me once again define what I believe to be a very significant customer requirement that print by reference can satisfy. In very carefully fencing this requirement it is important to say what it is not.
It is NOT printing web pages. Much of the concern I have seen expressed in recent email, especially from HP, has to do with printing web pages. I agree that chasing links and dealing with the multitude of data types on the web is very complex and could potentially bloat a Printer implementation.
It is NOT printing documents that require some security mechanism to access them. In particular it does not deal with the printing of documents where the right to print a copy of the document must be purchased. As Larry Masinter has suggested, the protocol may reserve some "space" to encode credentials for such transactions, but I do not want to complicate the model nor hold up approval of IPP as a standard trying to architect and get approval of these security mechanisms.
There are at least two examples of what I think print by reference is for version one of IPP:
First, consider the case of documents, such as Internet-Drafts, or those documents which we have on the PWG ftp site which are accessible by anonymous ftp, i.e. they are "publically accessible". Print by reference is a powerful tool for printing such documents. Documents are in some print-ready format, such as Postscript.
Second, consider the case where an enterprise keeps a library of documents (standards, reports, procedures, etc) on a central repository that is accessible by anyone within the enterprise firewall. It would probably be on a private internal network. Print by reference is again a very powerful tool for printing such documents which are in some print-ready format.
To summarize, this simple version of print-by-reference only requires that the documents to be fetched are already formatted for printing. The Printer does not deal with links, it does not format pages, it does not deal with dynamic web formats, etc.
Roger K deBry Senior Techncial Staff Member Architecture and Technology IBM Printing Systems email: rdebry@us.ibm.com phone: 1-303-924-4080