At 07:16 PM 3/8/97 -0700, geoff wrote:
>>I agree Patrick and, if I recall correctly, Randy from Sharp.
>>This lemming type rush towards SNMP/II/HTTP is the worst choice. This is a
>classic case of the tail wagging the dog.
>>Strong words, but this has gone far enough. IPP must be driven by brains,
>not inertia or path of least resistance.
>
----snipp-snipp-snipp---
Geoff,
did you wake up on the wrong side or what? Many of your assumptions about
this project seem to be founded on a general impression that this is all
wrong. Let me try to set a few things straight.
1) If the traditional IETF crowd is so superior in developing standards for
everything, how come that nobody had tried to address the subject of
Internet printing much earlier? My reply is that that printing today is not
as trivial as many of you out there seem to believe. Just because you all
USE printing, does not mean that you know how to DO printing in a
technically sensible way. I think that it is long due for the IETF to get
some work done in this important, but so far neglected area.
2) You are worried that most of the active participants happen to come from
the US. There are some good reasons for that. To make a good printing
solution you need to have some expertise, which means people with a certain
amount of inside knowledge of not only the history, but also about the
development trends for the next generation of printers that will be in the
market about the time the standard gets implemented. It just so happens
that most of the printer vendors are either American or Japanese. Most of
these vendors are now represented in the project (the Japanese vendors
either directly or over some US West Coast subsidiary). As these companies
sell their printers worldwide, do you really think that they would ignore
the rest of the world, which might be a more important market for many of
them then the US? Many of us work for companies that continually get
printing requirements from many different market segments from all over the
world. BTW my efforts to get a couple of European printer vendors involved
have so far been unsuccessful.
3) Personally, I am a Swedish citizen, have spent most of my life in Europe,
working for non-American companies in several European countries. Also, my
wife is Japanese, so I claim to have at least some understanding of the
international aspects of things. I am trying to keep an open eye that we are
NOT producing an American standard as you are so keen to believe. Several
of the active members in the IPP project have worked in countries other than
the US, including some 3rd world countries.
4) It is true that we currently look at HTTP as one possible way to transfer
the IPP operations. A number of companies are going to launch such printing
solutions as proprietary solutions over the next 6-18 months - you have the
choice of de facto standards without any influence what-so-ever from the
IETF or any other standards setting body, or to help in the development of a
standard within the framework of IETF.
5) The IPP group, from its inception, has been as open to everybody as any
other IETF group. It was only last week that the IESG decided to charter the
group as an official IETF WG. I expect that we will now have a lot more
people getting involved. All meetings and phone conferences that are beeing
held are minuted and sent out on the DL, just as in any other WG. The
suggestions and debate on the DL is given at least as much attention as
anything said in a phone conference or face-to-face meeting. We are trying
to make a standard in a relatively short time frame. If we do not manage to
do that, you would see a number of similar, but probably incompatible,
solutions in the market place instead. Is that what you prefer?
6) If you are so worried about us being on the wrong track with HTTP (which
is also on the IETF standards track in case you missed that), where are your
constructive counter proposals for discussion? I am sure we all look forward
to see them and discuss them. Please note BTW that we are making a model
document, which describes all the printing semantics in a neutral form,
allowing mappings to many possible transport mechanisms. If you want to
start a subgroup which produces a different transfer mapping, please bring
together a few interested people and we will get it going.
7) If you think that we are running this project in a way that is not in
line with the IETF guidelines, please point it out and I will make sure to
correct it. I suppose that we have a much higher degree of participants with
backgrounds in companies that either build printers or print servers,
meaning a higher degree of vendor background than has been common in some
other projects. However, I cannot see that such people would do a less
qualified job, than the more traditional IETF academic crowd. With the
increasing importance of Internet technology in the overall market place,
the IETF will also need to move with the times - and they do, as far as I
have been able to observe. The world is now moving ahead in Web year tempo.
If we cannot keep up with that, there is a high risk that the IETF will
follow the ISO as the next standardization dinosaur.
Regards,
Carl-Uno Manros
IPP WG Chair