Keith,
Thanks for the reply. Your vision sounds pretty good,
assuming the non-Unix platform vendors provide that (new)
capability in the future. Given that Microsoft is somewhat
involved in the IPP process, then perhaps such capabilities
will appear before the end of the millenium. (no joke)
A quick aside, your Unix example is quite nice, I agree.
However, those not familiar with Unix (and all the common
variants) should understand that your example is actually
not valid, at least from stock O/S vendors.
Perhaps you were thinking of the capabilities provided by
Patrick Powell's fine LPRng suite, which exposes network-
attached printers using standard hostname conventions
(rather than sysadmin-defined printer objects on the local
platform).
...jay
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Keith Moore wrote:
>> > We have heard PWG people say things like:
> >
> > "You can put your IPP printer URL on your business card!"
> >
> > But what does this really mean? That is, how (and when and where)
> > would a user enter an IPP printer URL? We have long come to
> > admit that it won't be applicable to mainstream browsers (one
> > of the top three reasons we wanted to use HTTP in the first
> > place, since fallen by the wayside in terms of IPP benefits).
> >
> > From what I can tell, IPP URLs are effectively hidden from
> > end users; instead, the end user's local printing system will
> > front-end any/all IPP interaction.
> >
> > Is this an accurate depiction?
>> from UNIX, I'd expect to be able to do
>> % setenv PRINTER ipp://spot.cs.utk.edu/slug> % lpr filename.pdf
>> (much like I do now)
>> >From a GUI interface, I'd expect to be able to pull-down a File menu
> and select a Print option which would pop up a dialog box that gave
> me the option of entering an ipp: URL as an alternative to choosing one of
> the preconfigured printers. (similar to the option that lets me type
> in a network printer accessed by SMB)
>> In an really nice world, the printer chooser would then talk to the
> printer and figure out what kind of driver it needed to print.
> If the driver were not already installed, the dialog box would then
> give me the option of either installing a driver from disk, downloading
> one from the net (hopefully with adequate authenticity/integrity
> protection), or using a generic driver to talk to the printer.
> (assuming my system already has a driver for common PDLs)
>> Of course, the IPP group can't dictate OS vendors' user interfaces,
> but I see no reason why the IPP protocol cannot be used in this way.
>> Keith