IFX Mail Archive: Re: IFX> Thoughts after first meeting

Re: IFX> Thoughts after first meeting

From: Harry Lewis/Boulder/IBM (harryl@us.ibm.com)
Date: Mon Sep 25 2000 - 15:47:26 EDT

  • Next message: pmoore@peerless.com: "Re: IFX> Thoughts after first meeting"

    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@peerless.com
    Sent by: owner-ifx@pwg.org
    09/25/2000 11:47 AM

     
            To: ifx@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



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Sep 25 2000 - 15:55:40 EDT