The birth of the Internet printing protocol (IPP)

Abstract

■ The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) defined not only the basic transfer protocols that make the Internet a reality, but also a number of applicationlevel protocols, including protocols for e-mail, file transfer, and the World Wide Web. However, the area of printing over the Internet has so far not been addressed. This was the most obvious reason for initiating the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) project. Another major reason was that several vendors had started to work on their own proprietary solutions for web-based printing, which would have meant competing de facto solutions that would probably not have been able to interoperate. This article gives you some historic background on earlier printing standards and describes some of the development processes and choices that the project had to make in order to come up with solutions that meet most of the requirements without being too complex. It describes the major steps that we went through, and introduces a number of the people who contributed to the development of the IPP. he history of printing standards has two separate starting points: