Apart from interoperability (which is the whole reason that the
IETF IPP WG got their charter, to build an Internet standard
replacement for LPR), I'd say the other great strength of IPP/1.0
is the explicit typing of all the attributes in the over-the-wire
encoding (which greatly enhances ease of extensions and
preserves interworking) and the ability to present 'mixed'
job sets, with string attributes of individual jobs in many
different languages simultaneously. IPP/1.0 is the best that
the IETF has done so far about internationalization, in any
protocol.
Lastly, IPP is strongly based on ISO 10175, Document Printing
Application (DPA), so it interworks well with implementations
of ISO 1075 (such as the NDPS you mentioned in your note).
As is the PWG's recent Job Monitoring MIB v1.0 (Feb 1998),
which covers the full range of IPP job attributes.
Cheers,
- Ira McDonald (outside consultant at Xerox)
High North