Life always gets interesting when an essential "must have" overlaps
directly with "no way José"!
The motivation for "QualDocs" apparently embraced both sets of
requirements - the "IPP Fax" AND broader "driverless" printing goals. I
support Paul's recommendation to split the specification as an effective
way to address the (powerful but unique) semantics of IPP-FAX (legal
issues etc.) Still, I feel both efforts are essentially follow-on to IPP
and need to be remain coordinated to prevent rampant divergence.
Harry Lewis
IBM Printing Systems
pmoore at peerless.com
Sent by: owner-ifx at pwg.org
09/25/2000 11:47 AM
To: ifx at pwg.org
cc:
Subject: IFX> Thoughts after first meeting
Firstly, thanks to all who attended the initial IPP Fax (as I must now
learn to
call it) meeting in Chicago.
The passionate (did I hear heated, even) debate was a good sign; people
think
this is important and we all have strong ideas about what should be
delivered.
Ron Bergman has posted detailed minutes for the meeting (thanks Ron) but I
will
repeat here the major points.
1. The name was changed from Qualdocs to IPP Fax. Most people felt
Qualdocs was
not clear and did not translate well for non USA attendees.
2. The charter was updated and accepted. No major changes were made to the
charter except to specifically state the we were building on IPP. Tee
modified
version is on the web site http://pwg.org/qualdocs/index.html.
3. We thrashed out what we meant by 'high bars' low bars' 'negotiated' ,
etc.
with regards to image parameters.
What did become apparent was a split in people's views about how this
technology
is to be used. The FAX attendees saw this as a 100% FAX product - whereas
the
broader imaging attendees (printers, copiers, scanners) saw wider
usefullness in
having a standardised, negotiated image format (as well as Faxing).
The wider uses include things like copier to copier copying, network
scanning,
ad-hoc printing, etc.
Specifically the debate came down to whether or not the transmitted
documents
needed to be watermarked or stamped in some way. For the pure fax people
this
was a must, for the wider uses this would be a disaster. I am sure there
will be
other divisions too. I had crafted the charter to allow for the wider uses
as
well as the fax case but no form of word crafting can get round this
fundamental
divide. The solution I propose is that we split the spec into two pieces.
A) A common agreed image format with some form of negotiation / discovery.
This
can be used regardless of whether or not the transport is doing 'IPP fax'
or
not. We will end up specifying the rules associated with saying that you
support
'application/tiff-fx' as a document format.
B) A set of enhancements to IPP to get 100% into Faxing on the internet.
Includes identity exchange, security, watermarking, etc. We would make A a
pre-requisiste
Actually splitting might well speed things up (divide and conquer)
What do people think?
Paul Moore