Hi Nancy,
After reading the excellent minutes from the MFD sessions in
Colorado, I wanted to provide some background on prior art
for the term "Resource" in printing protocols.
Resource is a first-class object in ISO DPA (ISO 10175)
- see section 9.8 of ISO 10175-1 - it contains fonts, forms,
logos, etc. (so-called "document resources").
In 2008, I wrote an IPP extension for Resources in collaboration
Tom Hastings (Xerox) and several contibutors from Novell:
ftp://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/ipp/new_RES/draft-ietf-ipp-get-resource-01.txt
Ultimately this work was not pursued in the IETF IPP WG, due
to several alternate proposals (one object for each Resource
type), the inclusion of Driver resources (later separated), and
the imminent demise of the IETF IPP WG.
But as Ted Tronson (Novell) pointed out in March this year,
Novell iPrint supports the private operations:
0x401D novell-resource-add
0x401E novell-resource-list
0x401F novell-resource-delete
0x4020 novell-resource-download
One important design constraint - both ISO DPA and the IPP
work-in-progress did NOT support "document data". I strongly
urge that any new Resource Service SHOULD NOT support
the storage or retrieval of "document data". Fonts, etc., have
unique copyright and intellectual property constraints that do
NOT apply to user document data. Conversely, user document
data has privacy and access control constraints very different
from fonts, etc.
I suggest that you review the IPP work-in-progress for the
well-documented set of attributes (properties) of the Resource
object. May as well be coherent, while re-inventing the wheel...
Cheers,
- Ira
PS - I would be happy to contribute to the Resource Service
spec and to bring some DPA/IPP context to this discussion.
--
Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Chair - Linux Foundation Open Printing WG
Blue Roof Music/High North Inc
email: blueroofmusic at gmail.com
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