> I want to hear back, on the DL, as quickly as possible where people now
> stand, so that we can indeed put this particular part of our specification
> to bed and move on. I would like your responses back no later than Monday,
> July 13.
I take it you mean "Monday, July 14" as the deadline.
In any case, I don't think the proper consensus can be reached until we
hear from the sponsors of the SWP proposal (Microsoft and HP). Hopefully
they are monitoring this discussion and will post their "votes" by this
Monday.
After reviewing Bob Herriot's set of example encodings (nice job, Bob),
I feel I understand the impact of the proposed "tweak", yet I still don't
come away with a strong feeling that such a change is really needed.
I realize that some folks (such as Steve Zilles and Roger deBry) have
been lobbying for a Tag-Length-Value (TLV) approach for a while now,
but the group had previously said NO to this approach (right?). Yet,
the topic is once again being brought up for consideration.
If the desire is to have a TLV mechanism, then why are we reinventing
what has already been accomplished via ASN.1/BER? (This is precisely
what several people had previously asked back when this topic was
discussed on the DL...and the net consensus was "Don't Do It".)
Personally (FWIW), I could live with this proposal if I had to. But
as I keep saying, what really matters is whether the authors of SWP
are willing to accept it.
If accepting this proposal causes the SWP camp to revert to the position
prior to the Nashua meetings (ie, two conformance levels, where Microsoft
doesn't implement some of the absolutely key features for IPP), then this
proposal is totally unacceptable.
The greater good of IPP rests with pervasive deployment of a reasonable
set of standard features. Anything that gets in the way of this simple
goal--such as insisting on this "tweak" proposal--should be discarded
out of hand, IMHO.
Let's see what Microsoft and HP have to say about this proposal.
...jay
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